[Forward]

Dear Reader:

Let me say right off the bat: I don't write fiction, though I've thought about it. I am a journalist and nonfiction book author. I've dabbled in poetry to hone my ability to use words in artful ways and express ideas as succinctly as possible. I've even written a short story, but it was actually a thinly veiled "true" story.

I'd like to share with you over the next week my experience of becoming a writer, trying to make a living at writing, choosing a specialty, authoring books, and the personal and professional opportunities and struggles I've had along the way.

I don't intend to tell you "how to succeed as a writer." I hope, though, you will find affirmation, comfort and encouragement in reading about another writer's experience and the bits of wisdom he's managed to gain from it.

I was in college the first time someone told me I could write well. My political science professor not only gave me a high grade on a paper, but also wrote, “See me.”

In his office, he said something nice about my writing, then made a sales pitch for the “PoliSci” department and explained why I should switch my major. This was years before I got as interested in politics as I am today—22 years in Washington, DC, will do that to you—so I stayed put in the English department. I think I chose well because I’ve never regretted majoring in English.

After college, I began corresponding with another of my professors—of English, a mentor and role model of what an educated, articulate man looks like. In those days before e-mail, the early 1980s, this meant a backing-and-forthing of actual letters. I usually typed mine on the old Royal manual typewriter I bought just after college. The purchase of that typewriter was probably the first actual step I took toward becoming a writer.

In one letter, my prof told me, “Whatever else you do in life, never neglect this ability you have to write beautifully.”

That was powerful stuff coming from a man who’d published more books than any other member of the college faculty, who guest-lectured across the country. It became the seed planted in my mind that began to germinate over the coming months.

Living in Boston two years after my college graduation, I enrolled in Emerson College’s master’s-level professional writing and publishing program. I took classes on magazine writing and editing, and a class with novelist Dan Wakefield on “prose writing.” This was the first time I chose to write nonfiction—an essay—while most of my classmates wrote something fictional.

Dan showed my essay to his editor at The Atlantic. It didn’t get me the summer job reading short-story manuscripts I interviewed for. But it got me a big shot of encouragement from C. Michael Curtis, still a senior editor at the venerable magazine.

I decided Emerson’s program wasn’t going to get me the practical experience I needed if I wanted to make a living as a writer, rather than dabble in it as a hobby. I took the GRE and applied to the top three journalism master’s degree programs in the country—Columbia, Missouri and Northwestern. I got into two of them, and chose Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism because of its hands-on philosophy of journalism training and its Chicago location.

I waited tables and did an internship in the headquarters newsroom of the Christian Science Monitor during the months before I started my program in Illinois. It was a thrill to work in a real newsroom, with real journalists. It was even more thrilling to see my own by-line in the newspaper a couple of times when I contributed articles.

During my internship, I continued to write book reviews for the Advocate, as I’d been doing since late 1983. My reviews in the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine were my first nationally published work. I used to laugh at the fact that I was writing for a leading gay publication and interning with another publication whose parent, the Church of Christ Scientist, was unwelcoming to its gay members.

Arriving in Evanston, Illinois, in the dead of winter 1985, I was a little older than most of my Medill classmates when we started our master’s program. I was also an enterprising grad student, selling and publishing quite a few of the articles I wrote for my reporting classes.

At Medill, I groomed myself to be a religion writer. I was convinced it was smart to specialize in a particular subject area. And I wanted to devote myself to something that interested me and affected people on a deep personal level. I wasn’t interested in reporting on church bazaars or bar mitzvahs, but I was interested in how people live out their faith in society and politics.

I wrote articles on such subjects as the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago’s work with the city to address the gang problem. That class project became a front-page story in a national Catholic newspaper.

I spent the fall of 1985 in Washington, DC, reporting for a small Wisconsin newspaper. The internship-type Medill News Service program was part of the hands-on training Medill specializes in.

I’d wanted to move back east after I finished at Medill in March 1986, but didn’t want to go back to Boston. I also wasn’t interested in moving to a small town somewhere, reporting on fires and police reports, hoping eventually to move up to the “big time” in a major city.

I thought that in Washington I would get a job in some sort of policy think tank, writing reports and things about how evangelicals and other people of faith were influencing government policy—as they did during those Reagan years.

As it turned out, a man I met in DC while I was at Medill News Service would shape my career more than I realized at the time. I didn’t know how much he would also shape my life and help me to discover the values I hold dearest.

NEXT: DID I CHOOSE MY SPECIALTY—OR DID IT CHOOSE ME?

Bio: John-Manuel Andriote began his writing career in 1983, reviewing books for the Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine. After earning a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Andriote built his career in Washington, DC, over the next two decades. He specialized in reporting on the AIDS epidemic, and in 1999 published Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (University of Chicago Press). It was followed by Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco (HarperEntertainment, 2001). Andriote is also the author of The Art of Fine Cigars (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown) and a privately published history of Washington's Metropolitan Club. He has written feature articles, commentaries, reviews and profiles for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many other publications. Today Andriote lives in Connecticut, and is working on a revised edition of Victory Deferred for publication in 2011, the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.