The Last Word On Nothing

The other day, a fellow writer shared a link to a residency opportunity in a science writing group. Like most residencies, the situation sounded ideal — a few weeks in an idyllic place where you’d have peace and quiet to delve into a big project and meet other writers. I looked at the logistics: the application required a letter of recommendation with a deadline a month from now. Oh, and you must be an early career writer to qualify.

Am I still in my early career? With each passing year, I am less sure, which probably means I am creeping further away from “early career” and more into “mid-career.”

I have never found a satisfying definition for what separates the two. An age cut-off seems silly, though in some fields, like academia, 40 seems to serve as a proxy. Years of experience might be a good metric, too, except people have different ideas about where to draw the line: a professor friend suggested that people with less than 5 years of experience are early career, while a friend in the medical profession said she thinks of early career as less than 10 years. A writer friend said ten years into her career is when she realized she most likely didn’t qualify as “early career” any more, but couldn’t point to why a decade meant anything besides that it was a “nice, round number.” Personally, I’m not even sure how to count how long I’ve been doing journalism — I spent years writing pieces for journalistic outlets on the side before making the leap into freelancing full-time. (I also have always felt like a bit of an imposter since I didn’t go to journalism school, so I’m not even sure my first few dozen pieces should count as bona fide journalism.)

In some industries, job titles and salaries might reflect more seniority, but as a freelance writer, it’s less clear what might be a promotion, and salary increases are hardly a given. (Not-so-fun fact: According to a 2022 freelancer survey from the National Association of Science Writers, median compensation for science writers is the same as it was in 2014.) I asked another writer friend where to draw the line, and she mentioned a fellowship for early career writers she didn’t apply for because she wasn’t sure if she qualified. “Best I can tell, they define early career as not regularly publishing features in the New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker,” she said. Working with well-known outlets is certainly a sign you at least kind of know what you’re doing, but perhaps the ability to write for those publications regularly is a mark of reaching “mid-career” territory. Hell, feature-writing or even having editors who will consistently answer your pitch emails might be signs of moving out of early career; when I was starting out, I dreamed of having stable relationships with publications and being trusted with longform pieces.

Here’s the real reason behind all my hemming and hawing: I don’t want to be mid career, because I feel like I’m expected to… how do I put this… know stuff. I shouldn’t sell myself too short here; I have learned a lot in my years of journalism, and am grateful to the many mentors and editors who have helped me grow as a writer and reporter. But as one of my writer friends said to me: does this mean I am supposed to be in a certain place in my career already? And now that I have reached some semblance of stability (lolsob journalism in 2022), is it worth the risk to try new things in my career and really suck at them? I’d love to write more essays or try podcasting, but how, exactly, does a mid-career journalist break into a different niche of writing or journalism? And further complicating things, for some people, mid-career intersects with other major life changes, like becoming a parent or primary caregiver for family members, which requires paring down your workload just as you’re feeling stable and established in the field.

As for that writing residency: the application info didn’t include a definition for “early career,” so regardless of whether I’m early or mid career, I’m inclined to leave space for folks who are at least earlier career than me.