Unless you have a blog, royalties from books you’ve written, sponsors, a clothing line, a show on Netflix, a wife who works full-time and has insurance through her job, and you can demand speaking fees to give seminars at outdoor shows, you aren’t going to pay the mortgage as just an outdoor writer. It’s got to be something you love to do.

Guide and outdoor writer Josiah Darr nets a Columbia River summer king for Michelle Peters.
As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an outdoor writer. Dad had a Field & Stream subscription, and I can remember reading stories written by Ted Trueblood, Norman Strung, Peter Barrett, Ken Schultz, Patrick F. McManus (before his Outdoor Life days)… but only after turning straight to “Tap’s Tips.” And of course I was always ready to get my free pocketknife for reupping to Fishing and Hunting News. Through it, the kid from tiny little Lookingglass, Oregon learned about exotic sounding places like Steens Mountain, Hell’s Canyon, or the Ochocos, and the Trask and Wilson rivers in Oregon with their giant fall Chinook. Could there possibly be anything better than having the rivers and woods as your office?
Naturally, life got in the way of dreams, and reality set in in the form of bills to pay, a family, and a career. Before I knew it, I was working 40 hours a week in a cubicle and fishing and hunting on the weekends, just as I’d always done. This whole outdoor writing thing was destined to just be a dream after all.
The BnR BOMBER Bobber Dogging Floats are finally here!
These floats feature cork body that is more dense than traditional foam floats to increase your casting distance. This is helpful whether you are fishing from the bank on your favorite tributary or in a boat. Each float is manufactured with a large diameter through hole and reinforced with a grommet on both the top and bottom of the stem.
Key features of the float are:
- Dense cork construction
- Large diameter through hole
- Reinforced with grommet
Floats are available in three sizes:
- Small- 1/8th to 3/8 oz weights (4-9 grams)
- Medium- 1/4th to 1/2 oz weights (7-14 grams)
- Large- 1/2 to 3/4 oz weights (14-21 grams)
If this sounds like your experience, let me tell you three things. One, there is a path forward that leads to you writing, and getting published. Two, if you want to be published, it is more important that you be a good writer than it is that you be the world’s best hunter or fisherman. Three, don’t quit your day job. It is this second point that is the most important. If you’re reading this magazine, then you probably have enough know-how to help someone else catch a fish. The hard part is expressing your knowledge in a way that readers can understand, and are interested in enough to follow along.
There are ways to grab and hold the reader’s attention and ways to bore readers. I started writing articles because I grew uninterested in a lot of what I was reading, and thought I could do better. Authors spent too much time describing the tackle they were using, how much experience their fishing buddy has, what bites felt like and what the fish did during a fight. Not enough content was spent on explaining why the author chose to fish current seams rather than tailouts, or why one presentation was better than another in a given situation. I was much more interested in learning how to do something than in hearing about someone else doing it.
There are a few ways to “hook” a reader to pique their interest in an article, keeping them reading long enough to absorb what you’re trying to teach. Sometimes, it’s best to lead with a startling or provocative position that people can’t wait to read about.

To get the story it’s important to get out there and play the real game of life. Bill Herzog is the real deal. He doesn’t just write about fishing he lives it almost every day of the week. Here he is shown catching a pink salmon near Tacoma.
There was a lot of this with the very earliest articles on using jigs for steelhead. Not only were marabou jigs and “gasp” floats the sort of thing that kids used to catch crappie, two important parts of show-ing one’s steelheading chops were mastering a baitcasting reel and detecting subtle bites on drift gear—in fact, these were two skills that steelheaders would wear like merit badges. Jigs? Floats? Pffftt!
I was a jig skeptic for a long time, and largely for these reasons. That’s too simple…there’s no way that can work on MY river… I’ll feel like such an ass if anyone sees me using this stuff… Fast forward to today, and think about how much ink has been spilled in the last 30+ years writing about jigs and floats, and their next-generation counterparts, pink plastic. Think even a few years further down the road—do we get to bobber-dogging and soft beads without jigs and floats? I don’t think we do. Jensen eggs and Gooey Bobs were around for a long time before jigs and floats got popular, and they certainly didn’t lead angling into any revolutionary directions.
Often it can be useful to lead with a relateable story that proves a larger point to be made later in the article. This can seem like putting the cart before the horse—why tell me how great this certain technique is if you haven’t told me how to use the technique?
The key with this sort of article is to give the reader just a little taste of what’s about to come so they want to learn how to do what the author did. If I write an article where I start out by telling you in a story about how I caught a winter steelhead using an unusual method, and tell you that you can do the same thing, you’re probably going to want to read the article. It then becomes my job to keep you interested and walk you through how you can do what I did in the initial story.
With this sort of article, it’s always a good idea to throw in a little bit of foreshadowing, or introduce a little bit of tension. “I knew that if I could get my spinner behind the rock, the steelhead would bite…” Sometimes it’s good to let the reader figure something out on his own, then reward him with being right or with being pleasantly surprised. “I knew that with the water being this low, the steelhead would be concentrated in certain areas. (“Hey…I know where they’ll be…”) I decided to focus on fishing the deep pockets and the heads of holes where there was some turbulence. (“EXACTLY what I was thinking!”)” Or make him care about the outcome, even though it may have happened long ago on a steelhead steam far, far away. “Watching my son land his biggest steelhead on a lure he made himself made my whole season.” Any of these will result in a reader who feels good about what they’re reading, and who will want to continue.

Michelle Peters, President of Visit Lewis Clark Valley, intercepted this Columbia River Chinook before it had a chance to make it to her area. Many outdoor writers work with tourism agencies.
There are times when a generic compare-and-contrast format makes sense. Some people learn things much better by being able to make familiar associations with non-fishing activities. This is especially helpful in an article where you’re trying to make a very basic point about a broad topic.
For example, if I were to write an article about drift fishing sandshrimp as opposed to eggs, I might first talk about the things they have in common. Both add an element of scent to a presentation, both are relatively fragile, and both can be used with an octopus hook, yarn, and a drift bobber. I could then also write about the qualities that make them different. Sandshrimp have a shorter shelf life than eggs do, they must be stored differently than eggs, and how there is pretty much one kind of sand-shrimp but there are countless variations on cured eggs.
Examples can even be briefer and simpler than this. One way is to compare fishing a certain way to something familiar that sounds absurd, but really isn’t much different. “Fishing a jig and float on a big river with an 8’6” rod is a lot like carving the Thanksgiving turkey with a butter knife…”
The most difficult part of writing about fishing is getting the ball rolling in the first place. This is true both article-by-article, and on the continuous production level. I think about fishing to one degree or another throughout each day. For many of my articles, I will see a sudden, random connection that completes a half-cooked thought I’d had for a while. I might watch an episode of “Hoarders: Buried Alive” and it might make me think about my billion or so Corkies that I’ll probably never use, but can’t bear to get rid of. This could be the seed that an article grows from. In the long term, the challenge is coming up with material that you or other writers haven’t written about several times already, or if that’s not possible, in presenting it in a fresh new way.
My best advice for beating writer’s block is to be open to sources of inspiration, but don’t force them. If you’ve ever glassed a brushy clearcut for blacktails first thing in the morning, you know that a lot of times you’ll see one move in the corner of your vision. Then when you look right at it, you can’t see it. Then when you look away you can see it again. Eventually, you’re able to see the entire deer and watch it go about its business. This is how you need to allow an idea for an article to take root. Provide it with a safe place to settle, but don’t push it too hard.
Another hard part is transforming what you know into understandable language without being too dry. You probably know how to back up a trailer, but can you explain it to someone in writing to the point that they could do it without a bunch of stops and starts and run-over curbs? Verbs are important. You and your buddies didn’t walk down the trail, you scrambled. You didn’t float slowly down the river, you meandered. The steelhead didn’t swim downstream, he tore off downstream. But don’t overdo it with adjectives. Not every single fish is majestic. Not every single cast is miraculous. Not every single strike is thunderous.

Guide David Johnson, Brent Knight, and Nick Amato worked together to catch this Willamette River spring Chinook. You can watch the video on our YouTube channel (Salmon Trout Steelheader).
It’s also important that your article have some sort of clear direction. Don’t jumble a bunch of random thoughts together and think it will make sense. Don’t do a stream of consciousness like “I’ve always preferred backbouncing eggs to flatlining Kwikfish in the slower currents. Chuck Yeager caught a salmon on a Kwikfish wrapped in bacon once. But it can be really cold first thing in the morning, so wear your fingerless gloves.” Try to have each point you make lead to another point, or to a conclusion. You think a lot faster than you type, but the reader can’t see inside your brain.
As far as getting published… different publishers do it in different ways. Those I write for are low-pressure and honest with me. If something I write doesn’t work, they tell me they’re not interested. They rarely tell me that they need something by a hard deadline, so I just send them articles as I write them. They’ll offer suggestions but leave the actual content up to me.
I’ve had other publishers whose method was to email a big group of authors with something like “We need 2000 words on Canada goose hunting in the Willamette Valley. Deadline is July 15.” I assume that if they got 8 submissions, they’d just keep the one they liked best and to hell with the others. That’s never really appealed to me.
In the cases of the magazines I write for, I just reached out to the publishers out of the blue, and they agreed to look at what I sent. There’s certainly some anxiety involved in reaching out, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Don’t worry about impressing your publisher with your knowledge, your skill, your body count, or anything like that. They already have the Northwest’s 40 most capable and famous anglers’ contact info in their phones, and they’re all on a first-name basis. If you want to make a good impression on a publisher, write a good article, don’t thump your chest.
Finally, unless you have a blog, royalties from books you’ve written, sponsors, a clothing line, a show on Netflix, a wife who works full-time and has insurance through her job, and you can demand speaking fees to give seminars at outdoor shows, you aren’t going to pay the mortgage as just an outdoor writer. It’s got to be something you love to do. In my case, I got started because I thought I could improve on what I was seeing published, and I’ve stuck with writing because I feel like it is important to pass along knowledge, and regional publications allow that knowledge to reach a wider audience. You have more to contribute than you might think—just work on getting the writing parts down, and give it a try.
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