Education

University of Texas at Austin

Podcasts

0:32:03

30: What It’s Like to be a NYTs Magazine Writer With Robert Draper, NYTs [Main T4C Episode]

Robert Draper has been a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine, for the last decade, where he covers domestic politics. He's also worked as a contributing writer to National Geographic since 2007, where he has traveled to numerous locations including Somalia and Afghanistan. For thirteen years, he..

16:37

183: How to Break Into Long-Form Magazine Writing w/ Robert Draper, The New York Times Magazine [Espresso Shots]

Career Path

Interview Highlights

“I think it’s a good idea to follow the careers of journalists who you admire decide for yourselves, whether the path that they’ve taken is one that you at least would like to begin on. And then after that, I would say, once you have gotten started, it’s incumbent upon you and you alone to decide whether that’s the path you want to continue on, or whether you want to branch out and do something else. And when you do that, it’s you, who has to make that leap. It’s never going to be an editor who says to you, you know, Hey, you know, you’re doing a great job covering the police beat, but I just can sense that there’s probably a novel in you somewhere. So why don’t you like take off and go run a novel for your career decisions and when to take the jump from one discipline to the next one, topic to the next, those are on you.”

Best Career Advice

“You can’t control necessarily how your work is published. You can’t control how many people read it. You can’t control how well it’s reviewed, how well it’s received by either critics or the public at large. So if you don’t really enjoy the things you can control: going out and reporting, sitting at home and writing, then you should think twice about being in the business because everything else is beyond your ability to control.”

Career Challenge

“It’s really difficult to break in as a writer. And I was lucky. I remember that early on while I was writing for this fledgling arts and entertainment magazine publication, the Austin Chronicle, a guy who was a young editor at Esquire had read something of mine and was interested in getting me to write for him. It was a real break. He assigned me a story and I did it and it wasn’t very good, but they paid me in full for it anyway. They never published it, but they still thought a lot of me or this young editor did and wanted to take a chance on me. So he assigned me another story. I remember I spent a month or two months working on this story and then turned it in, of course, I thought it was spectacular. He didn’t like it at all…The truth is is that even in failure, I still loved the process.”