"I write it, I send it in, he sends me a check."

 

Barbara started out at the Boston Business Journal.. After reading an obscure article, Barbara wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Business Journal. The editor thought she was a talented writer with a wonderful sense of humor. He offered her a job and she accepted. While attending a function at Copley Plaza,Barbara and her husband met the editor of the Boston Herald. She accepted this editors job offer and started writing feature stories for the Herald Sunday magazine.

Barbara would write one cover story a month on topics that were assigned to her by the editor. The magazine was cut due to financial difficulties. Barbara then did a freelance column every other week for the Boston Herald. Now, she writes a weekly column featured in the Living Section of the Boston Herald. Her columns run about 600 words per article. Barbara confesses she tends to overwrite. Her articles run an average of 634 words. Most of the time she is not edited.

During the past 10 years Barbara has had several different editors - 3 men and 4 women. Some editors she has never even met. The ones she did have relationships with have been great editors and have made her a better writer. Barbara's first editor told her that she had found her writing "voice". Once an audience gets to know the writing style of an author, they will recognize their work even with the name chopped off. A friend of Barbara once told her that she writes like a man.

She has never won any awards for her writing, but she does not think her line of work offers that many awards. She must be doing something right if she had stayed where she is for so long. Her friend Howey Carr once said to her,

"They may hate your guts, but they're going to want to have to read you."

Barbara doesn't need to interview people to write her articles anymore. She feels that Americans generally do not talk in full sentences and she tends to criticize other witers for changing people words into "perfect little quotes."

"I once wrote that I didn't think they should give a gun permit to any man who couldn't hit a 12 inch oval from a distance of 2 feet because men never pee in the toilet.....they have poor aim!"