Who cares about your opinion?

my very first op-ed for NBCNews

This is part of a monthly series called Path to Publication.

In it, I will unpack the story behind my stories. These reflections are part process, part strategy.

There will be clear takeaways for your own creative work. I will include sample pitches, along with editors’ names and rates (at the time my published pieces went live). I’m sharing the intel I’ve gathered in the hope that it can help you place your own work.

At the beginning of 2022, I had, essentially, zero bylines. Since then (in the span of two years), I’ve published nearly 50 short essays. It’s not like I became particularly prolific. I’ve always been a writer. I just became serious about learning the tips and tricks for placing a piece in a popular outlet. And that’s what I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

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I wrote my very first op-ed for NBCNews Think at the beginning of 2022. For several years, I’d been working on my memoir, FAMISHED, which explores the intersection of diet culture and purity culture.

I’d been immersed (obsessed) with the question of how our beliefs about God impact our relationships with our bodies. To answer this question, I read books like Fasting Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein.

And I was trying to brainstorm ways to get essays adjacent to the subject matter of my book (and my research interests) out into the world. I wanted to land an agent, find an audience, and get traditionally published, after all!

Photo by Laura Breiling for NBCNews

So, I considered the topics in my book.

I made a very stream-of-consciousness list: food, sex, girlhood, religion, Evangelicalism, purity culture, diet culture, the health and wealth gospel, pregnancy, motherhood, perfectionism, gender roles, rigidity, shame, etc.

If you’ve written a long-form manuscript (or hope to!), this is something I would encourage you to do, too, if you are trying to write essays adjacent to your full manuscript. Consider the themes. Let yourself think both broad and specific. Make a list. This list should give you ideas for essays you can write off-the-book.

Then, I looked to the calendar. One of the best ways to place an essay in a popular outlet is to make it timely.

You can do this two ways: by paying attention to the news cycle or by looking to the calendar.

Photo by Manasvita S on Unsplash

I decided to consider upcoming holidays. There were the obvious ones: Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July. New Years was a great time to talk about diet culture — but it was also a time that everyone wanted to talk about diet culture.

And then I remembered Lent. While I knew that religious fasting predated and stood outside of diet culture, every year whenever I heard fellow church-goers talk about fasting from food, their holy practices seemed intertwined with weight loss goals.

I knew that I, personally, with my history of disordered eating could likely never engage in a food-focused fast as a way to draw closer to God.

And I was pretty sure I was not alone: one study conducted by SELF and UNC Chapel Hill estimated that 75% of women between the ages of 25 to 45 have struggled with disordered eating.

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash

So, I decided to write an op-ed about this topic. This was way, way, way out of my comfort zone. One thing nearly all of my beta readers noticed about the writing in my memoir, FAMISHED, was that I let the story itself make the argument for me. I was interested in the narrative doing the telling, rather than explicitly stating my own opinion of a situation.

I think there are many reasons for this. One of them is that, generally, I don’t like being preached at, so I don’t want to preach to.

But, no matter: an op-ed requires an opinion. “We all have them,” Meredith Bennett-Smith, then-editor for NBCNews Think said in a workshop with UPOD Academy.

Another thing she said in this workshop was that she wished she received more pitches on the topic of religion. The public is invested and interested in this topic, but people are afraid to write about it.

So, I decided to pitch Meredith Bennett-Smith in mid-February. I sent a pitch rather than a full essay. Here it is:

Dear Meredith Bennett-Smith,

The timeline for Lent is based upon the account of Jesus’s forty days without food in the desert. As an Evangelical teenager, I read this narrative obsessionally. I’d been trying to fast away my puberty pounds. I could hardly make it a full day without succumbing to temptation. In my religious upbringing, there was an unspoken creed: thinness was next to godliness. To be good, you must learn how to not need. Abstention was to be sought over abundance. There was a particular holiness to anorexia.

In anticipation of Lent (March 2), I am proposing a timely personal essay, “If You’ve Worshiped at the Altar of Diet Culture, Don’t Sacrifice Food for Lent.” As someone who has received treatment for disordered eating, I propose that the best way to identify with Christ during the season of Lent is not to obsess over what we put in our mouths, but to look outside of ourselves and consider the embodied needs of others.

I love Think. I am a member of UPOD Academy, and you noted in a webinar with David Hochman several months ago that you wanted more pitches related to religion. My creative work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, Parhelion Literary Magazine, and in other outlets. I am a faculty member in the English department at Marshall University, and I live in Huntington, West Virginia with my husband and two young sons. 

Thank you for your time and consideration of my work. I look forward to hearing from you.

She responded within an hour with a simple, “I’m interested.” I followed up with my full draft by the end of the week.

My draft was about 800 words. The sweet spot for an op-ed is generally between 600-1,000 words.

She sent me edits two days before Lent.

Full disclosure: I did not get paid for this piece. This was, I believe, because I was new to freelance writing. I know others who have written for NBCNews who have gotten paid, and I believe the rate was several hundred dollars. At the time I received this yes, I only had one other real byline — and I desperately wanted to have this piece published, too. I was scared to ask about rates. That is not a mistake I would make today, but that was my reality two years ago.

Photo by onehundredseventyfive on Unsplash

Unfortunately, NBCNews THINK no longer runs op-eds (they discontinued the vertical just over a year ago).

If I were pitching this essay today, I would consult the OpEd Project for ideas of outlets that may run my piece. This link has a really comprehensive list of places that run op-eds, along with submission information.

This list, though, does not include editors’ personal email addresses. It just provides a general submission email address.

You are going to have better luck pitching a specific editor, rather than the general submission inbox.

To do this, choose an outlet, and try Googling the editor’s name. You could also look for editors’ names and contact info on X/Twitter. Many editors will place their work information, and even their direct email address, in their profile bio.

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And that’s how I landed my first op-ed with NBCNews THINK. If you’re interested, here’s the full piece: Don't Use Lent to Worship at the Altar of Diet Culture.

Let me know your questions about op-eds and about my experience writing for NBCNews in the comments.

Thanks for reading!