Confessions of a Freelance Writer

Book excerpt: In Confessions of a Freelance Writer, Terry Morris, already retired and in her seventies, wrote her recollections of the outstanding experiences she had during her forty-year career as one of the top magazine writers in the United States. From the more than 100 articles she published in many widely circulated magazines, including McCall’s, Red- book, Reader’s Digest, and Cosmo- politan, she selects outstanding examples and describes her methods of obtaining the stories, how she sold them, and their aftermath. She characterizes herself as a “garbage pail”— someone who picks up ideas and leads from throwaway lines others have discarded and builds them into personal-interest stories about all types of ordinary people in extreme situations. She also discusses how she established relationships with key figures in publishing in order to see her stories in print. This book should be of interest not only to the average reader but to aspiring authors in a large mass market.