Press Plant - Breaking Into Publishing

Eighteen months ago I announced my first job, as editorial assistant on a gardening magazine. What followed was a string of Chinese whispers culminating in an old university friend ringing to congratulate me on landing the role of assistant editor at the Guardian. When I corrected him, he spluttered "but you know nothing about gardening". This was of course partly true; I knew that plants existed and that they were complex with Latin names.

I lied during the interview about my not so green fingers. It was a necessary liberty with the truth to gain journalistic experience, when in fact I didn't know my hellebore from my elbow. I naively assumed I'd gain the subject specific knowledge on the job. A year and a half on, I still can't tell an allium from a trillium, but I'm a lot clearer on what I'm employed to do: compile a listings page, handle reader queries, input pictures on our on-line archive system and carry out an assortment of trivial administrative jobs for the editor. As an English graduate, I also spend a large part of my working month preparing budgets.

The reality is that my job doesn't demand a flair for writing or plant identification as much as it requires organisational skills, efficiency and the ability to multitask. Given the 'privilege' of attending the Chelsea Flower Show this year, I was struck by how little I knew about the world I had entered. I lied in the interview because I was under the impression that a love of gardening was a prerequisite for my role – that it would inform my articles as a staff writer. Yet still the plants taunted me from their wonderful show gardens with "look at me. Don't you know my name? Don't you know what I am?" However, the chance to leave the office for Chelsea had been such a rarity that I was entirely grateful.

I’m usually tied to my desk by a series of daily tasks so dull I have to daydream just to stay afloat. In fact it was during one of my budget-induced hallucinations that I first saw monkeys. They appeared from nowhere, knocking over filing cabinets and toppling mountains of press releases. They ate bananas on the editor’s head, defecated on the fax machine and wreaked havoc with articles on our Apple Macs. All that remained at the end of each encounter was a smiling version of myself surrounded by a frankly beautiful mess. Thanks to equally bored friends, monkeys are now a regular occurrence. I have an email syndicate going with our picture researcher and a few others. We send each other jpegs of chimps to keep us amused during our otherwise mundane chores.

So what did I really expect from my first job anyway? I’m not sure that I had any expectations at all. Arts graduates aren’t taught to expect specific jobs. We’re not even expected to think about them as part of our degrees. I went into my position with the hazy belief that I’d soon be doing some kind of writing. Like me, many first jobbers entering the magazine world to write are quickly sobered by the realisation that they’re lucky to be assigned a full-length feature in their first two years. They are usually simply learning the trade and doing endless tasks for the editor. Four page discursive articles on the latest literary fiction or best rock albums come years later when they’ve gained enough contacts to become freelance writers or specialists with interesting things to say. The awful truth is that the period between cerebral university essays and witty feature articles is usually an uncreative void of brainless admin.

“There just aren’t enough jobs tailored to English graduates,” friends moan. But what jobs did we really envisage? There isn’t much work out there specifically for people who wrote their dissertation on ‘Individualism, decadence and vice in the Victorian novel’, but whose fault is that? Is the world economy to blame for not providing us with jobs in Nietzsche Towers or Jungian World of Adventures?

Lack of creativity in the workplace does not necessarily have to be problem because you can do imaginative stuff outside work. But there are many inherent difficulties in moonlighting as a creative. We all want to do something inspired it seems, but are the sacrifices we have to make at the end of our day jobs worth it? So often it means not talking to your housemates in the evening, not writing yourself off on weekends, not watching endless DVDs and reading books to block out the voice saying “be creative”. Every working day I tell myself “If I weren’t doing a day job, I’d be writing novels, scripts or editing them”. But would I? Perhaps I’d still be daydreaming about monkeys with Apple Macs. I guess I’ll venture out of the world of the day job when I’m 100% sure.