How to Write a Conversational Piece

Jessica DeFino is a freelance beauty journalist living in Los Angeles, California. For the past seven years Jessica has been writing, researching, editing, and publishing about the beauty and wellness industry. Her work has appeared in Vogue, The Cut, Fashionista.com, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Business Insider, SELF, HelloGiggles, Harper's Bazaar, and more.

Before starting her career as a freelance journalist, Jessica worked as a beauty writer for The Zoe Report. She was Director of Communications at Fame and Partners, and worked as a ghostwriter for Khloé Kardashian and Kendall Jenner.

Jessica earned her bachelor’s degree in Music/Business Songwriting from the Berklee College of Music. Jessica’s music degree brings a unique perspective to her writing. It infuses each piece with lyrical qualities of storytelling, flow, and connection to her audience.

Jessica also publishes a bi-monthly beauty newsletter called The Unpublishable, where she shares “What the beauty industry won’t tell you — from a reporter on a mission to reform it.”

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

• Making lasting connections with your audience
• Why understanding music and rhythm makes your writing better
• Capturing and keeping your readers’ attention right from the outset
• The dangers of cross-posting your content across social media

Links & Resources

• Vogue Magazine
• Allure
• Harper's Bazaar
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• RhymeZone
• Ali Abdaal

Jessica DeFino’s Links

• Follow Jessica on Twitter
• The Unpublishable
• Jessica’s Instagram

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Jessica:
I started writing as a songwriter. The musicality of something is very important to me. So I’ll read my own stuff out loud sometimes. I feel when people can read something and there’s a clear flow and rhythm to it, and the words melt into each other sound nice next to each other, it locks them into the content early on. You want to keep reading because if you stop reading it’s like you’re breaking this rhythm that you’ve started.

[00:00:34] Nathan:
In this episode I talk to Jessica DeFino. She’s a journalist covering the beauty industry, but she tends to take an approach that’s not as popular with sponsors and publishers, because she’s anti a lot of their products and a lot of the nonsense that is put into the products and the marketing behind it.

She’s taking a critical angle and she’s well loved by her readers because of it, but maybe not so loved by the big brands. We talk about how that came about. We talk about her writing style, her approach of using her background in song writing and going to school for songwriting to have a better, more interesting writing style.

She gives some tips along that angle, talking about how she launched a newsletter last year and growing that to 9,000 subscribers. How that is a backbone for the rest of her work she does in journalism.

It’s a great conversation. So, let’s dive in.

Jessica, welcome to the show.

[00:01:28] Jessica:
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:29] Nathan:
We’ll jump around a whole bunch, but I want to start on the launching of your newsletter. What was the moment when you started to think, okay, I want to actually run a newsletter and start to control my own audience?

[00:01:44] Jessica:
I had been toying with the idea for a while, and then I think it was, April, 2020, right after the pandemic, where I had gotten into a situation where—I’m a freelance reporter—I had four freelance stories out when March happened, and Coronavirus lockdowns happened and everything was up in the air.

The company severed ties with all of their freelancers and basically gave these four unpublished stories back to me, and gave me a kill fee. So it was like I had reported out these whole stories. I had spent months on them, and now I had nowhere to put them, and I gave it about a month of pitching it out to other alums.

There weren’t any takers because media was in such a precarious position at the time. Finally I was like, maybe this is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to launch a newsletter. and I decided to call it The Unpublishable because I couldn’t get anyone to publish this. And yeah, it’s been going, almost like every other week.

[00:02:50] Nathan:
Nice. Yeah. It’s interesting how these unfortunate moments result in something that’s like, okay, this is actually either a good thing now, or hopefully going to be a good thing soon, but it starts with difficult times.

[00:03:05] Jessica:
Yeah, exactly. I wanted these pieces to be big. They were stories that I thought were important to tell, and I really wanted them to be in a major outlet. Sometimes with media, you can’t sit on things for very long. It was like, I maybe have two more weeks before they stopped becoming relevant.

[00:03:23] Nathan:
Yeah. So for context, for anyone listening, what were some of those stories as an example?

[00:03:27] Jessica:
The first story I published with a piece called “Where are All the Brown Hands?” It was a look into the overwhelming whiteness of the top nailcare companies in beauty. If you would look at their Instagrams or if you would look at their websites, everything was modeled on white hands.

As a beauty reporter, when I have to source images for the stories, I don’t want to just be showing white hands. If I’m writing about nail trends or whatever, and it would take me hours every week to comb through places and try to find the trend I was speaking to on a person of color. At one point, I was like, why is this happening and how come it’s so hard?

This should not be hard. So, I wanted to do an investigation into it, and just like that the whole process had already taken six months. I was like, you don’t know what’s going to happen in this story. It might be scooped. It might be written by somebody else. It might be irrelevant in another month or so.

So, I really wanted to get that out there, and that started it.

[00:04:31] Nathan:
When you publish a story like that, and you’re used to publishing for a major beauty publication, but you’re publishing it for yourself. What did that look like? What was the process of saying, I have this story that I’ve worked on for a long time, and I have a brand new newsletter and all at once.

How did you bring that to life and pull the audience together?

[00:04:52] Jessica:
Well, luckily at that point I had a mask, a little bit of a social media following just from my work on work, like major publications. Like I had been writing for Vogue and allure. Harper’s bizarre. And I had been pretty diligent about building up a social media audience. So I had a pretty sizable, amount of readers just from Instagram.

And a couple of years prior, I had like tried starting ...