What are some of the most important skills and abilities needed for this job?
You need to be curious. You need to know why things happen. You need empathy when you’re writing about people. You should have some sense of what it’s like to be the person you’re talking to, whether they’ve done something incredible or incredibly awful. Not to say that you take their side, but you need to understand what they’re doing. You need to read a lot, not only to gather information, but to see how other people write. From good writers, you get a sense of the rhythm of the words. You need to be persistent, in the gathering of information; it’s not easy, doing magazine stories; there’s a lot of work involved. The things that make stories are the little details, and the collection of details. In an interview, you not only need to know what happened on that day, but it may be important to know what size shoe a person was wearing, as an example. You need to want to be better as a writer. You should never be satisfied with your writing, because it’s never quite good enough. It may b
