Freelance Tips from John Bartlow Martin

With his ubiquitous horn-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and mild manner, John BartlowMartin looked more like a schoolteacher or a laboratory technician than a nationally known freelance writer. He believed more in hard work more than talent, once commenting, “Hell, I’m just a reporter.”

The Indiana-raised Martin had honed his observational skills as a gritty police, city hall, and re-write reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s and as a regular freelance contributor to such true-crime periodicals as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime.

In the 1940s and 1950s Martin progressed to having his work appear frequently in the “big slicks,” the mass-circulation magazines printed on glossy paper with such famous names as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s. Martin transcended the conventions of the fact-detective magazine genre in his true-crime articles for national magazines, attempting to place the subject in its social context. He avoided “the artifices, the false suspense and phony emotion,” of typical reporting about crime, and tried to preserve “the narrative value of the stories rather than transforming them into dry case histories.” What remained were powerful stories that eschewed any contrived suspense for “the suspense of fine inevitability,” the type of suspense felt by those attending prizefights.

Martin became one of but a select few freelancers in the country able to support his family. A 1955 Time magazine article on the “ruggedly individualistic breed” of freelance writer estimated that out of the thousands who attempted to make a career in freelancing for magazines, only seventy or eighty managed a yearly salary of $10,000. 

When Martin hit his stride in his early freelance days writing stories for true-crime detective magazines, he churned out a million words a year, selling a third of them at two cents a word. By 1957 Newsweek magazine cited Martin as one of the highest paid freelance magazine writers in the country, estimating his income at $32,000 in a good year. “I like everything about free-lancing,” said Martin, “with the exception of the lack of security. Sometimes it’s four to six months between checks, and that creates problems for my grocer and everybody else.”

In his writing for the big-slick magazines, Martin produced long, detailed drafts of his articles in a large downstairs bedroom he converted into his workroom at his Victorian home in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, and a cabin retreat he owned on Smith Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When asked where he was from, however, Martin always responded, “I’m from Chicago,” a city that often exasperated him, but for which he never lost his affection. Although invited several times to join the East Coast staffs of Life and the Post on a full-time basis, Martin preferred to remain in the place he knew best, the Midwest.

As a freelance writer (a profession he once described as “champagne today, crackers and milk tomorrow”), staying in the area he knew so well gave him a tremendous advantage. “The Midwest was where things happened, it was, almost, the locomotive of America,” Martin said. “And I as a writer almost had it all to myself, while in New York little happened and writers were scrambling all over each other.”

In March 1959 Martin received a letter from Jack Fisher, editor in chief at Harper’s, asking him for an article about the freelancing trade and his career as one. Martin declined Fisher’s offer, as he had other commitments to address, but the idea spurred him to jot down a few tips for those daring enough to embark on a career as a writer for hire. His guidelines include the following:

“Keep away—but not too far away—from liquor, women and politics.

Sit down in front of a typewriter and stay there.

Do not talk; listen.

Write only about things you love or detest; about nothing toward which you are indifferent.

Keep a schedule—any schedule.

Rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite.

Give yourself enough time.

Be sure.

Remember that the subject is everything, the writer nothing. Avoid the I. The subject, not you, matters.

You must believe what you write. And write what you believe. And write nothing else.

Keep a couple of ideas ahead so when an editor proposes a bad one you can counter with a good one of your own.

Writing gets harder, and so does legwork? Why? Because you see more. When younger, you see more clearly because you see less. When older, you see more and things become less clear—the man who 20 years ago would have seem thoroughly evil is now seen to be human too after all, and this must be taken into account too.”