Education

University of Texas at Austin

Podcasts

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. For the latter, Draper has traveled to the all-male monastic community of Greece’s Mount Athos..

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

“You have to realize that when you talk to sources that they are not just doing this in fulfillment of the First Amendment, they have reasons for their own. You should take that into account, but that’s just part of the whole process rather than a deal ender or a deal maker.”

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.”