057: Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer Part I: On Storytelling & How to Thrive as a Creative

For those finishing up this year’s Nanowrimo, we have a treat. To those not in the know, National Novel Writing Month is an annual creative writing project that takes place during the month of November where participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript. I myself have completed the challenge about 5 years ago and attempted it again this year.

In this episode, we have a novelist and top magazine editor who will share their wisdom insights on their career paths in media. 

Inspired by their own time dating and working in New York City media, married couple Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer have written MR. NICE GUY (St. Martin’s Griffin; October 16, 2018), a provocative rom-com set in the world of Manhattan publishing.

Taking an insider look at the magazine industry, gender dynamics, and being young and ambitious in an ever-changing city, MR. NICE GUY is the perfect read paired with a bowl of movie popcorn, extra butter.

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Who are Jennifer and Jason? 

Jennifer Miller is a journalist and the author of three books. Her debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was called “a darkly comic romp” by The Washington Post and “entirely addictive” by Glamour. Jason Feifer is editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, host of the podcasts Pessimists Archive and Problem Solvers, and has been an editor at Men’s Health, Maxim, Fast Company, and Boston magazine.

Jason and Jen met on OkCupid. She said “yes” to a date because Jason used a semicolon correctly in his first message to her. Yes, they are super nerds, but hey, it got them featured in the vows column of the New York Times. They live in Brooklyn with their 3-year-old, who they hope will never read this book.

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Words of Wisdom

From Jason:
I think that it is great to have this job without the ambition of this job. I mean there was a time when I developed an ambition to be an editor-in-chief of a magazine. That wasn’t the original intention but I got there at some point. But life doesn’t move in a direct clear path. If you identify something hyper-specific that you wanna do, you will narrow yourself down and turn down all the amazing opportunities that can come along the way.  (8:53)

My perspective on work is that you should always be working your next job. So you come into a job and you get good at it and then you look around and say, ‘What opportunities might I have available to me that nobody’s actually asking me to do? What is not part of the role day-to-day and yet could be ultimately the thing that could be the bridge to what comes next?’ (11:42)

From Jennifer:
Immerse yourself in communities and worlds that are different from what you grew up in, different from the ones you feel you automatically gravitate towards. It just gives you a lot of perspective and it gives you a lot of material. As a journalist I’ve found that to be extremely helpful for my fiction writing because a lot of the reporting that I do has introduced me to people and communities I would never have encountered otherwise—things like motorcycle riding, Vietnam veterans or Native American medicine men who are at the forefront of new mental health treatments or teachers who are doing really innovative things in their classrooms with technologies, all these things I learned about as a reporter. In various ways I was able to put it into fiction, so I had just a broader menu of things I just felt comfortable writing about. (14:41) 

You’re continually developing your voice and every book that you write has a different voice but searching for your voice and what is kind of unique about the perspective that you can bring and how you are communicating that perspective, that’s actually a big theme in MR. NICE GUY. (16:33)

In journalism, especially if you’re writing in New York, the publications that tend to pay the best are women’s publications, like the Cosmos, and the Glamours and the Marie Claires. You’re actually gonna get generally more money writing for those publications than you would writing certainly for a newspaper. There’s this kind of idea of what the readers of those magazines want which I think is really retrograde and outdated, but it’s starting to change a little bit. If you were going to write for GQ for example, you could write a rich, in-depth, reported long-form magazine story in which you’d really be able to dig into the characters, tell your story in a unique way and have your voice be heard. (17:42)

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What You’ll Learn

• How both Jennifer and Jason were able to grow in their respective career paths
• How we have more control over our mindset than we realize
• Insights into the magazine world and what really goes on behind the scenes
• Some of the challenges and frustrations they face in journalism and media

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Websites:

https://www.mrniceguynovel.com/
http://www.byjennifermiller.com/
https://www.jasonfeifer.com/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/

Social Media: 
Jennifer Miller Twitter: @propjen 
Jason Feifer Twitter: @heyfeifer

Other Listening Options:
Individual player or full player view on website: https://lorirochino.com/podcast-2/