by Joe Wallace

One of my favorite bands of the 90s was a Japanese girl-group called Cibo Matto. The name of the band is Italian for “food madness”, and the group’s earliest songs were definitely food-centric, especially on the track Beef Jerky.

What does this have to do with freelance portfolios?

Every editor has their own strange little hiccups. Personality quirks. Some call them “defects”.

Mine is that whenever I get replies to my latest call for writers or when I browse online portfolios looking for someone to offer some writing work to, I hear a lot of Cibo Matto.

That is to say, I hear a lot of this one line from Beef Jerky. If I’m reading a resume or an online freelance portfolio and I run across material that seems needlessly self-aggrandizing, or  completely (and cluelessly) irrelevant, I hear the line from Beef Jerky where the lead singer is screaming, “Who cares? I don’t care! A horse’s ass is better than yours!”

This happens–I kid you not–EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I once startled the people in the office (back when I actually worked in an office outside the house) by chanting the lines out loud and giggling at some doofus thing I spotted in a writer’s resume. Then I had to explain the whole story, play the song for them and by the end of the day, I had an office full of people all going, “Who cares? I don’t care…” It’s catchy and fun to sing. You’ll wind up doing it too, once you hear it.

So here’s what is making me hear those voices in my head as of late; the writer who included on her portfolio that she’s the cousin of a b-list comedian, the SEO writer who lists his Catechist of the Year award, the writer who mentions being used as a source for someone else’s article, the writer who listed their experience as including Harvard Design Magazine then only lists Hubpages clips in their writing credits section, the guy who listed a film festival as one of his awards. Really? The WHOLE festival? Wow. The writer who charges $5 an hour.

All this might sound cynical. It may seem harsh to call people out for their noob mistakes. Except that in many cases these people listed their experience as being more than two years and in the most egregious case, a writer who listed her experience as more than 12 years (and charges more than $70 an hour) also promised to take my project and “make it lucrative and successfull“. (No, I didn’t mangle the word ‘successful’, the writer with 12 years of experience did. On the bloody portfolio.)

There’s nothing wrong with being a newcomer. Just don’t LOOK like one. Comb through your portfolio and be absolutely ruthless. Pretend YOU are the editor, the hyper-caffeinated, totally busy and underpaid editor who has to sort through these things. Narrow your eyes and be the worst cynical a-hole you can be when looking at your own resume and your own writing. You WILL improve by doing it. Attack anything in your presentation that makes you look clueless, that makes you seem desperate, that conveys any impression other than confident, comfortable in your own skin as a writer, and ready to work hard.

Remember, in spite of what you read me writing here (I know my own faults) the key to selling yourself as a freelancer is to be confident without being arrogant (I failed!), to be competent in the craft without being pedantic (failed again–anyone who USES the word “pedantic” has just blown it), and dependable without being a toady. (OK, I’m good at that one.)

Now get to it!