Navigating Writing Styles and Media Gatekeeping

Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com. She hosts the podcast Normal Gossip and is the author of the upcoming book You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.

“I was always very interested in how you strategize a creative career. And I think that that is an unsexy thing to talk about, right? It's much sexier to be like, Oh, I love working on my sentence-level craft, which is not true for me. But I think that a lot of a creative career is understanding it is still a job, and then understanding how you make sure that within the container of the job you can do the work that you want to do. That is a really difficult balance to make. So if you can understand how people who have done it before you, you can copy them.”

Show notes:

• @mckinneykelsey
• kelseymckinney.com
• McKinney on Longform
• McKinney’s Defector archive
• 04:00 “Why Doesn’t Mrs. Dalloway Get a Day of Her Own?” (Slate • Jan 2000)
• 13:00 “Chris Evans: American Marvel” (Edith Zimmerman • GQ • July 2011)
• 23:00 McKinney’s Deadspin archive
• 31:00 God Spare the Girls (Harper Collins • 2022)
• 39:00 “Gossip Is Not a Sin” (New York Times • July 2021)
• 43:00 You Didn’t Hear This From Me (Viking • 2025)
• 58:00 “Learning To Play Piano When There Is No Recital” (Defector • Dec 2023)

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