"Come to editors with solutions, not with problems. A lot of young freelance writers will be like, 'Hey, hook me up with this editor. Do this and do that.' And I'm like, 'I can connect you, but you better have pitches. If you don't come with the idea you're just a problem,'" says Tony Rehagen, a long-time freelance writer.

Seth Wickersham put me in touch with a colleague of his, someone he went to grad school with by the name of Tony Rehagen. Now, he’s a special kind of freelancer in that he’s a grinder. Much like Pete Croatto and other freelancer types who are balancing all kinds of work: content work, copy writing, alumni magazine work, and pure journalism, Tony has been in the thick of the freelance morass for a long, long time. He was featured in the 2015 anthology “Next Wave” for his piece called The Last Trawlers, a work of journalism that really reads like a short story.

His work has appeared in myriad places like Indianapolis Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Men's Journal, and Bloomberg.

Tony was a blast … there are too many great nuggets from this conversation to list out, but I’ll list out a few. We talk about:

His filing system for stories
How many stories he’s working at a time
Being on the clock and off the clock all the time
Treating his writing as a service or a trade like plumbing or carpentry
Treating editors more like clients
Taking risks with how much skin he puts into a certain story
And where his ambitions lie now.
And that just scratches the surface.

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Episode 514: Tony Rehagen is Never and Always on the Clock

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

Episode 514: Tony Rehagen is Never and Always on the Clock