The glamorous world of writing for a living

There are days when it just doesn’t pay to go to work. A bad day might include anything from a boss who’s overbearing, a customer who definitely isn’t right, a report that’s completely ignored, or an assignment to find 10 guys to locate the clitoris on a diagram.

Oh.

Maybe that’s just me.

Writing is a wonderful job. You will never find me complaining about being able to do what I love for a living. But that’s not to say that it’s not without its bad days. Deadlines, for instance, are always bad days. Particularly when you know you’re just not going to meet one. Remember that feeling you had at school when you had homework assignments due the next day and you hadn’t even started. Welcome to my life.

I’ve been lucky in that my writing career has been varied. I’ve written on everything from sex (a lot) to cushions (fortunately, not that much). I’ve worked with some of the smartest, funniest, best women (mostly) and men (occasionally) you’d ever hope to meet. I got to go to Australian Fashion Week. I got to interview celebrities (not that often, I don’t enjoy listening to rehearsed answers all that much). I got to organise Bachelor of the Year one year (yes, it was fun, no, I didn’t meet my husband there).

But it’s not all cocktails and beefcake. Which brings me back to the clitoris.

I was working at CLEO, wrangling bachelors and writing such memorable features as ‘Wedding Dress never worn’, which featured, inexplicably, a photograph of a woman riding an exercise bike in the wedding dress she’d never worn (what do you mean you don’t remember that one?), when my editor called me into her office. She was worried that Australian women were missing out on the orgasms to which they were entitled because Australian men simply didn’t know where the clitoris was.

“Find out,” she ordered.

“Find out what?” I asked, too dumbstruck to move. Working at a mag like CLEO demands a lot of you – specifically, that you exploit your friendship networks to find suitable case studies for stories. My mind was boggling about how exactly I was going to discover if the men of Australia could locate the clitoris.

“Find out if they know where it is – get 10 guys to locate the clitoris on a diagram. We’ll run a photograph of them next to their attempt in the mag.”

Of course.

It was while waiting at a petrol station in western Sydney to meet a guy, who was a friend of a friend of a friend, who was happy to roll out my ‘diagram’ on the bonnet of his car and put an X where he thought the clitoris was before lining up in front of a blank wall for me to take his photograph, that I had a revelation. I needed a new line of work.

Ten years later, I’m still looking for one. I left CLEO not long after that story, but not magazines or writing. How could I? What other job offers that kind of variety?

And, for the record, 8 out of 10 guys from my very small sample got it right.