I’m very excited for today’s post as I was given the opportunity to do a Q and A with Lou Schuler. Lou is a bestselling author and journalist, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, a contributing editor for Men’s Health magazine, and has mentored some of the top writers/coaches in the fitness industry.
The focus of this interview is on being/becoming a fitness writer. Whether you have aspirations to become a published writer or not, I think you have a lot to gain from his responses.
Nick: Lou, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk with me today. For anyone unfamiliar with the name “Lou Schuler,” can you give us a little background on how you got started in the fitness industry? Were you determined to become a world-renowned fitness writer from day one, or was this something you just sort of stumbled upon?
I’ve been writing about fitness and nutrition for just over two decades. But I didn’t start until I was 35. Before that I spent almost two decades trying just about everything a writer can attempt. I wrote novels and screenplays. I worked at newspapers and magazines. Sometimes I got great assignments and interviewed interesting people who were doing interesting things. At the other end was the time I wrote an article about methylene chloride paint strippers for a trade magazine called Painting & Wallcovering Contractor. I needed the money.
That’s how I got into writing about fitness. I needed the money. I hadn’t even heard of Men’s Fitness magazine until I applied for a job there. But once I started working full-time at MF in 1992, it clicked for me. I’d been working out since I was 13, and now I could actually get paid to write about my favorite activity.
I moved across the country to work at Men’s Health in ’98, starting writing books in the early 2000s, and now here we are.
Nick: What exactly is your process for writing a blog post, article, or book? Do you think there is a single “best” way to write, or does each writer need to develop his own unique process and style?
There’s no single way to write anything. I spend far more time on the opening paragraph than anything else. That’s the downside to writing so much about one subject. By the time you see one of my articles in Men’s Health, or a post on my website, the opening paragraph may be my 4th or 5th attempt. Once I’m happy with the opening, the rest usually comes together pretty fast.
But that’s me. I wouldn’t recommend my process to anyone else. For someone who’s writing about each topic for the first time, it’s far more important to complete a thought – to write out what you want to say, from start to finish. Then you can circle back and decide if you’ve said it in the best possible way for your target audience.
The downside to writing straight through, without stopping to second-guess, is that once words are on the screen, they start to look “right,” even if they aren’t. But that’s a dilemma every writer faces with every type of writing.
Anyone who tells you there’s only one way to produce good work is probably trying to sell you something.
Nick: The first time I contacted you, you told me to take a more humble tone and to use personal experience in my writing. Why is this so important to attracting readers and keeping the ones that you already have?
In the first couple of articles you showed me, there were references to your “core beliefs” and things you’ve said a thousand times. I pointed out that if the audience doesn’t know who you are, they haven’t heard you say anything once, much less a thousand times.
Writing for an audience is always a balancing act. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between who you are and what you know. You can have a deep reservoir of information to share, but a shallow pool of authority. The audience looking for the information you have to offer doesn’t yet know who you are. Until then, they’ll look elsewhere for the information.
It’s like a courtship in the early stages. You don’t woo a potential mate with your knowledge and authority. You hint at those things, sure, but the actual wooing is done with humor, kindness, generosity, accessibility, coolness under pressure, problem-solving skills …
The strategy evolves as your audience grows. You share deeper knowledge, and you present information with an assumption of authority. But if your presumption of authority exceeds your audience’s acknowledgement of that authority, you have to dial it back until you reach a point where your presentation matches the perception.
Nick: I remember hearing a while ago that “you are what you spend the most time doing.” Why are squirrels so awesome at finding nuts? Probably because they spend 98% of their waking lives scaling trees and scavenging for food. For someone looking to make a name for himself as a writer in this industry, what is a realistic amount of time he can expect to spend writing on a daily basis?
This is another question that’s impossible to answer. Writing every day is probably better than writing on random days. Setting aside a consistent, predictable amount of time is probably better than writing what you can when you can.
All of which is easy enough to say, but I don’t know how practical it is. Probably every great writer who ever lived started out with an unpredictable schedule, scribbling notes whenever he could sneak away, usually when he was supposed to be doing something else.
That’s where the best work starts: with some element of risk. You come up with a great idea and you just have to write it down before you forget. The problem is that you’re in the middle of another task that also has some urgency attached to it. The creative and practical sides of your brain are pulling you in opposite directions. You have to choose one and hope no one notices that you’re compromising the other.
The best writing won’t come out of a calculated attempt to make a name for yourself. It comes from a deeper need to express yourself, or to advocate for ideas you feel passionate about. Writers have huge egos, and all of us want monuments erected in our honor. But underlying that intense self-regard is a true belief in the value of our work.
Usually, I mean.
Nick: One of my favorite aspects of your writing is that you write like you talk. Is this something that can be taught, or are some people just born with this skill?
If anybody is born with that skill I don’t really want to know, because I had to work hard to make my writing easy to read.
Good writing should pass what I call the radio test. If you read your article or post on the radio, would a listener be able to understand what you’re talking about?
Nick: Humor can enhance or cripple a piece of literature. How do you determine the amount of humor to include in your work?
For me, more is usually better, as long as it doesn’t feel like I forced it into the mix at the expense of the clarity or quality of the information. But for anyone else, who knows? We all need to play to our strengths, and to avoid inflicting our weaknesses on an audience. So if humor doesn’t come to you naturally, you probably don’t want to emphasize it in your writing.
It’s like your previous question: When you write like you talk, your writing should organically reflect your sense of humor. If you’re quick with a one-liner, and your one-liners typically get a laugh from your audience, you’d be doing your readers a disservice by not including some humor in your work.
Nick: Everything in life has its pros and cons. What are the challenges associated with writing for a living?
The “making a living” part never gets easier. But I don’t really want it to be easy. Easy is boring, and when it’s boring it’s the last thing I want to do. My fitness writing for Men’s Health is always challenging because they don’t want anything unless it’s new and rigorously reported.
With my books the rigor is self-imposed. With each one I have to rethink what the target readers need to know to accomplish their goals. If the answer is, “I’ve already told them everything they need to know,” then I either need to find a new audience or a new topic to write about.
The other big challenge is to grow as a writer. For me that means setting time aside to write fiction, or different styles of nonfiction. Back in February I wrote a post called “How a Man Ages.” I’ve forgotten why I started it, but I remember it took a bittersweet turn about halfway through. What I thought was going to be a satire about male immaturity ended up a little deeper, sadder, and ultimately more hopeful.
Other times I’ll write something that feels like it needs to be written, but doesn’t need to be shared. I’m glad I got it off my chest, but that doesn’t mean I should impose it on anyone else. There’s only so much attention I can ask anyone to give me. I waste that attention at my own peril.
Nick: Do you think that writers need coaching?
Depends on their goals and the type of coaching they need. I’ve worked one-on-one with guys who had lots of ideas, but didn’t know the best ways to present them. We worked mostly on structure: how to get a reader engaged, and how to keep the reader’s attention while you flesh out the idea.
Other writers may need more remedial help on issues like grammar and sentence structure. Or more advanced help on nuances like varying sentence length and word choices. So each situation would depend on the coach understanding the writer’s needs, and working with the writer at that level.
Nick: What is the difference between writing on topics related to health and fitness, and writing fictional novels and short stories?
The obvious difference is the length of the work and the audience’s expectations. The nonfiction reader is looking for information, and is more likely to skim until she finds it. If you don’t have what she needs, she moves on to the next article or post. The fiction reader wants to be transported somewhere else – into different lives, and sometimes different worlds.
But all readers want a good story. In journalism we often start an article with what we call an anecdotal lead. If you’re writing about healthcare reform, you don’t start off with, “Everyone needs health insurance, but healthcare.gov really sucks.” You start by describing a specific person’s unusual or interesting circumstances, and you make that person’s story a microcosm for things that are going right or wrong with the system.
Same with fiction: You don’t start off with your big ideas or themes. You start with a person. Make us care about that person, and we’ll care about your ideas.
Nick: Time for the big question. What do you need to do to break into the industry and write for a living? I know you have too much information to put in this short interview, but didn’t you co-author a book with Sean Hyson and John Romaniello on this exact topic?
The three of us produced How to Get Published: Writing Domination in the Fitness Industry. For me it was a culmination of almost 10 years of answering questions from fitness pros much like you.
Sean is an editor at Men’s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness, and assigns hundreds of articles a year. So while my expertise is in the mechanics of writing and the business of publishing as a freelance writer, Sean’s comes from an editor’s perspective: getting what he needs from contributors so he can do his job.
And Roman is a force of nature. You’ll find lots of writers who’re smart and ambitious. There’s a smaller pool of writers who’re also charismatic. But you’ll almost never find one who’s all those things as well as an incredibly successful entrepreneur.
It’s divided into five separate ebooks. I wrote three of them, covering the basics of writing, the more advanced process of writing a book, and the life of a writer. Roman wrote Part 2: Fitness Blogging for Fun and Profit, and Sean wrote Part 3: How to Get Published in Magazines.
The five ebooks include the best advice we can offer, based on our cumulative experience in our corners of the business.
Nick: Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this interview Lou. Is there a way for the readers to follow you and check out some of your other works on Strength Training?
It was my pleasure! I’m in all the usual places: my website, the New Rules of Lifting site, Facebook, Twitter, Quora … You can also find most of my Men’s Health articles here.
Email- nsmoot2@gmail.com
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Facebook- Smoot Fitness
