Getting Started
"I came to journalism for the stories. I needed to write. I loved the words and the sentences; the rhythms and the sounds...The keys go clicka clack. Twenty-six neutral symbols are willfully recombined...But I was young. I need something to write about."
- From Scary Monsters and Super Freaks
When asked how Sager launched his path as a writer, he starts by saying, "It's one of those things that in retrospect seems like a great first chapter, but when you're doing it, it's pretty tortured." When Sager was attending Emory University as a history major, he worked for all the school publications, including its newspaper, literary magazine and alternate weekly. He then wound up in law school in Washington, D.C., but his first week there knew it wasn't for him. He quit in his third week, determined to become a writer. "I just loved the craft, and I wanted something to write about."
Looking for a journalism job, he even considered becoming the editor of CB Alert, but a fraternity brother saved him. His mother worked in the Style section of The Washington Post and got Sager an interview for a copy job. As Sager recalls with a laugh, "I had all these clips from how I had worked as a real journalist, but I failed the spelling and typing test, and they said I couldn't get a job there!" Sager would eventually apply to thirty different newspapers across the country, but no one would give him a job.
Scary Monsters and Super Freaks
It was what he called "a super-heated 11-month period" where he was determined to become a reporter. "I had quit law school, told my parents I was gonna go be a writer, and I was bound and determined to do it. My hair was falling out at this point, I moved out from my girlfriend of six years, I dedicated myself to the whole thing."
Sager kept calling the Post, and finally got a job where he didn't have to spell or type well: the wire room. "In those days all the news came in through teletypes," he explains. It was a tedious job, but he learned his craft by watching everything around him. "I was reading, studying, watching, keeping my mouth shut and doing what I was told," he says. "It was like grad school, an apprenticeship and a first marriage all rolled into one."
While at the Post, Sager constantly went for freelance gigs at the newspaper whenever they came up. Sager worked the night shift at the Post from 7:00 to 3:00, after which he'd go home, sleep for a couple of hours, ditch his regular shift duds, then come in the next morning with his interview suit on. Some at the paper thought he had a brother: "you know, the one with the suit..."
