Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Writer learns that freelancing is for the birds

By Vern Hansen

Pray fervently that your child does not meet with success too early, or too easily, in life. If your boy or girl should do so, it could have the same effect as winning $1,000 on the first lottery ticket you ever bought. All of it and more would be spent in the vain hope to beat the odds again, even bigger.

I was one of the eight senior high school students who was chosen by our class adviser to be on the yearbook staff. Almost overcome with the honor of seeing some of my words in print on the pages of our orange-and-black annual when it came from the printer, my corpuscles raced at the sublime possibility of a literary career. "Maybe I'll be a writer, like La Rochefoucauld," I thought.

So inspired, I sat down at a typewriter, and in a flurry of heated inspiration, I fired off a short piece on Bing Crosby's outlandishly colored sports shirts to the editor of the estimable Des Moines Register.

Except for a song called "Country Wedding Day" that was published by Shapiro-Bernstein & Co., and recorded by Mercury Records, I never sold another thing from my pen until nearly 30 years later.

Now I can count more than 25 credits in newspapers and magazines across the country. But I wish I had never made my first sale so young and so early, to what became a sorry addiction to inscribing words for pay.

Freelancing is for the birds. Literally.

I was part of the audience one summer afternoon at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery, taking notes for an article on George Shearing, when just as the British-born pianist ended what he was playing, a blue jay on an overhead tree limb added a coda: "Kack! Kack! Kack!" it called, producing a ripple of amusement from the audience.

I looked up. Pursed my lips. And softly said to the jay, "I'm for the birds!"

"I know! I know!" the jay kacked back.

I'll have you know that the audience was not privileged to this exchange, or the chorus could have been resounding.

A roving freelance writer suffers many pangs. Some of the reasons editors reject your work never cease to be boggling. For instance, I submitted a piece to an editor on a superb artist I discovered. I wrote a good profile on him and his work, but it came back with a note saying, "To feature any one artist would bring all the rest of them out of the woodwork" (he should have said, "studios") and added, "to mention one is to scorn the others."

Rather than going into shock at such logic, I took it up with the ACLU. "The paper was right," a spokesman said. "One of the fundamental rights of artists is to suffer. Being ignored is basic to that. If you publicize one above the others, it threatens their masochism. They all begin to feel insecure.

I could have let the incident pass at that, except for the unnerving effect it has had on all my work. There was this story I uncovered about the heroism of a moving-van driver on the freeway. And what happened when I turned it in? I'll tell you.

"He is a Bekins' man," the editor said. I can't run the story without being hit by an avalanche of protests. From Allied Van Lines. American Red Ball. Atlas. Global International. Lyon. Mayflower. And others."

I could cite other examples. But the culmination came one day when a neighbor rapped on my door. "Quick!" he cried. "Bring your camera!"

"What's up?" I asked, racing for it.

He pointed to a small boy climbing a tree. A young bird had fallen from its nest and he was returning it.

When I saw that, I headed back toward the house.

"Aren't you going to snap it?" the neighbor said. "It's a nice human-interest story."

"Maybe so," I replied, "but you don't know editors like I know editors. If I took that to the paper, do you know what they'd say? 'We don't want to be overwhelmed with angry calls from Audubon Society members. Their people have been returning birds to their nests for decades without press notices.'"

So, if you hear of a runaway horse on the freeway, a man biting a dog, a bull throwing a Congressman, an innocent man being sent to the Legislature or an old lady helping a Boy Scout across a busy downtown street--I don't want to know.

Birds sit comfortably on barbed-wire fences. Freelancers don't sit comfortably on editors' rejections, often just as barbed.

Freelancing is for the birds. And you know what becomes of a lot of them. They end up in a taxidermist's lab. Filled with the write stuff.

Vern Hansen is a Los Gatos resident.