To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s some great writing I’ve been reading during the week of Feb. 15-19, 2010:

Chris Jones’ profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire – Beyond the shockingly candid photographs of Ebert, who lost his lower jaw battling cancer, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man, is a touching portrait of a guy who lives to write, now more than ever. Of his relationship with Gene Siskel, his movie-reviewing partner from 1986 to 1999, Ebert says: “…we were born to be Siskel and Ebert.”

Susan Orlean’s part historical, part whimsical look at pack mules – Stubborn, yes, but sturdy too, which is why the U.S. military is using them in the war in Afghanistan, according to Orlean’s piece, in the Feb. 15-22 double issue of The New Yorker (subscribers can read it online; non-subscribers can read an abstract). This follow up to her witty piece on backyard chickens makes Orlean the magazine’s de facto livestock reporter.

Awake – A humor piece on insomnia by Jenny Allen, from The New Yorker, June 2, 2008. When a friend said she was starting a blog to chronicle her battle with sleep, or lack thereof, it reminded me of this stream-of-consciousness piece, and how perfectly it captures the experiences of menopausal women everywhere who spend their nights trying to fall back asleep. Not that I’d know anything about that.

John Canzano’s columns from the Winter Games in Vancouver – Canzano is an award-winning sports columnist for The Oregonian here in Portland who people either love or hate. I happen to love his particular brand of passion, outrage and everyman charm. So far, his Olympics coverage has been classic Canzano. He’s taken NBC to task for its commercial-laden, tape-delayed coverage (even here on the West Coast where we’re in the same time zone), called out Olympic organizers for multiple failures that led to the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili and decried the dearth of young skiers vying to be the next Bode Miller, a consequence of snowboarding’s growing popularity. By far Canzano’s most touching Olympics column was the one he did before the games even started, a visit with 1984 alpine skiing gold medalist Bill Johnson, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2002 and now lives alone in a trailer park in the foothills of Mt. Hood.

Given what’s happening in the media business, freelancers can’t afford to cultivate an exclusive relationship with one newspaper or magazine.

Actually, an exclusive relationship would be sweet – think of all those letters of introduction you’d avoid having to do and the time you’d save.

But unless you’re under contract at The New Yorker – and even that doesn’t work out so well for everybody - a single publication doesn’t have enough work to keep someone busy 100 percent of the time, leaving writers to cobble together a livelihood by taking assignments from any number of sources.

That can be a problem when publications have policies over what writing on similar topics freelancers they work with can or can’t do for competing publications.

Writers, of course, want the opportunity to pursue as many markets as possible: the bigger the pool, the more likely someone will bite.

Publications on the other hand, don’t want a freelancer they work with to do a killer story on a topic said writer usually covers for them for their arch rival.

Publications address this in different ways. Some put “category exclusivity” clauses in contracts barring a freelancer from writing anything else on the same topic for any of their major competitors for a specified period, often 60 or 90 days. Many category exclusivity contracts list the competitors, so everyone’s clear on who’s off limits. Here’s the exclusivity clause included in the contract Inc. uses:

Notwithstanding anything contained in this Agreement to the contrary, Author shall not permit the Work to be published in any other business, financial, or new economy magazine, including, without limitation, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Wired, Portfolio, or Harvard Business Review, or on any business, financial, or new economy Web site not owned in whole or in substantial part, or operated by or on behalf of, Publisher.

If a magazine or Website likes a writer enough, they may sign them to a contributing writer contract and pay them a retainer for filing a set number of words or stories per month. I’ve had such arrangements before, and if anybody wants to work out the same kind of deal with me again, please call. All joking aside, such arrangements commonly include a list of competing magazines the contributor agrees not to pitch while under contract.

Some magazines take a less formal approach, relying on a writer’s word that while they’re writing for the publication they aren’t going to simultaneously work on a story on the same topic for the publication’s biggest rival. I’m a contributing editor at one trade magazine and have discussed with the editor which magazines they view as direct competitors so I could avoid pitching anything to them. While I’m not bound by a contract, I value my relationship with this publication too much to do anything to mess with it, especially since they’re by far the best written, best edited, and best run, title in their industry.

Some magazine’s exclusivity clauses are pretty onerous, especially if you specialize on a certain topic. But just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. I’ve successfully negotiated very broad contract language regarding category exclusivity, changing it to specify a certain take on the story I’m doing for the publication, not on the topic in general.

I’ve also successfully negotiated changes to contract language that would have restricted my ability to blog about topics I also write about. One of the reasons I got into blogging in the first place was to get up to speed on topics I want to write about, so I’m not going to agree to limit what I can blog about for anybody.

You’d think that with things as bad as they are for magazines and newspapers, publishers would be less heavy-handed when it comes to category exclusivity clauses in contracts. Even they have to see freelancers can’t make it writing for one publication alone. Until they do, don’t be intimated by what’s on the printed page. You can negotiate better deals for yourself.

A friend who sells medical supplies takes a pragmatic approach to rejection. When a company says no to what she’s selling, she brushes it off and moves onto the next prospect. “In my personal life I can’t handle that kind of rejection, but at work it doesn’t bother me,” she says. “It’s just business.”

Writers deal with rejection all the time. But when a magazine editor says no to a query or kills a story, how many of us brush it off as easily as my saleswoman friend?

Rejection has been the topic du jour since Dan Baum wrote about his 2007 firing from The New Yorker in 140 character installments on Twitter a few days ago and then reassembled it as a whole piece on his website.

Not only was Baum fired by New Yorker editor David Remnick, he had five stories killed in the three-plus years he was a staff writer. Given the standing of The New Yorker in the American publishing industry, that’s rejection on an epic scale.

After reading Baum’s explanations of why he was fired and why the stories were killed, the whole episode seems less an edict on Baum’s abilities and more a confluence of unfortunate events and personality mismatch with a little bad decision making thrown in for good measure.

For example, in 2004, Baum wrote a story about how Florida was preparing for the presidential election that was killed over concerns about reporter bias after he mentioned to an editor he’d spent an afternoon distributing Kerry literature. A 2004 story about geneticists was killed after editors decided it was too similar to one by Malcolm Gladwell that had appeared in the magazine eight years earlier. A story on U.S. Special Forces troops training the Philippine army to fight terrorists never ran, according to Baum, because editors let it sit for months then killed it after a competitor ran a piece on a similar topic.

Baum wants it to be known that his explanations, which are posted on his website along with the complete manuscripts of all the killed stories, are only his own, how the killing of these stories looked to him at the time. He allows that he could be all wrong, that the stories were killed because they simply were no good.

What Baum’s explanations show me is that sometimes, it’s not you, it’s them. As a writer you can hit all the marks – write the perfect query or turn in exactly what you were assigned, – and still be rejected because circumstances have changed, the editors changed their minds, or when all is said and done, they’re just not that into you. Another great example of this is William Georgiades’ 2004 Mediabistro piece on his dealing with a Conde Nast editor over an ill-fated travel piece.

The moral of the story: Even though writing is a creative process, it’s still a business. The sooner freelancers come to terms with that, the easier it is to put rejection in its place, and like my saleswoman friend, move onto the next prospect.

According to Baum, he decided to come clean about his New Yorker experience after being asked about it at readings for Nine Lives, his book about post-Katrina New Orleans that debuted in February. You can read more about Baum, the book and his New Yorker days in a recent interview with the Colorado Springs Independent.

You can read more of what people are saying about how Baum used Twitter to tell his New Yorker saga in Gawker’s take on the story.

Not all rejections are bad. In fact, some are worth celebrating, according to Tim Beyers, a Denver freelance writer for Motley Fool and host of the weekly #editorchat session on Twitter, in a post called A word about rejection: dude. Beyers writes: “One I received last month from a national publication included this note from the editor: ‘You’re a good writer, and I wish you all the best.’ I think she means it. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself these days.”

To deconstruct other reasons magazines turn down writers’ queries, read Susan Johnston’s blog post on The Urban Muse, called 15 reasons your idea got rejected.

The first time I ever heard of Arianna Huffington was in 1994 when her then husband Michael was the Republican challenger for incumbent Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat in California. My workspace in the Orange County Register’s newsroom was right next to the cubicle of the political reporter covering the election. During the race, this reporter would regularly come back from the day’s campaign activities overflowing with stories – not about Michael Huffington, but about his whip smart, politically insatiable wife.

I finally met Arianna Huffington four years later. I was writing a column about politics and the Internet for Reuters and covered a speech she was making at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. By then Huffington was divorced, on her way to eventually severing ties with the Republican party, and on the stump to promote her latest book, Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom. She was as knowledgeable, articulate and mesmerizing as advertised.

Today, Huffington is famous – or infamous, depending on who you talk to – as the founder and chief creative power behind The Huffington Post, the influential news blog. Even before her Internet days, Huffington was not shy about promoting herself or her latest venture. That’s crystal clear in a new profile of her, The Oracle, The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington, by Lauren Collins, published in the Oct. 13 issue of The New Yorker.

Ten years ago, Huffington was already talking about the Internet’s potential power in politics. Here’s what I wrote in that Reuters column:

Today’s Internet-using pols still number a tiny minority. But that should grow as they learn how to exploit the medium to mobilize voters around issues they care about, said Arianna Huffington, the noted pundit. “The more they’re for the status quo, the less likely they’ll be to use it,” Huffington said. “The more politicians who are reformers, the more they’ll use the power of the Internet. We haven’t even begun to scratch its potential for communications in politics.”

Check out that last line again. Huffington wouldn’t launch her namesake Website for another seven years. But it’s clear she knew she was onto something.

Working writers can’t always wait to be inspired. Deadlines aren’t that patient.

But if you let it, lightening can strike. You could be anywhere: a steamy shower, a long walk, falling asleep, in the middle of the night. And wham, there it is, the lead you’ve been searching for. The perfect structure for that feature story. The idea for an article you just know your favorite editor will love.

I call these “aha” moments. For me, they normally come when I’m relaxed or letting my mind wander.

I was inspired to think about inspiration by an article in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker on the subject of insights and how people get them, “The Eureka Hunt: Where in our brains do insights come from?” by Jonah Lehrer. (When I checked today, this article was not online yet. I’ll make the link live when it is.)

In his story, Lehrer interviews a variety of scientists who study the brain and comes to some of the same conclusions that people who work in creative fields like writing have discovered intuitively: that if you walk away from a difficult problem your brain continues to tackle it and will come up with a solution when you least expect it; that being relaxed helps the brain do its thing; that the best time to work on creative endeavors is in the early morning when your mind is half-asleep but more open to new ideas than when you’re fully awake.

How do you get inspired?

I’m in New York today meeting with editors. In honor of the trip, here’s five media-related things I like about New York:

1. The New Yorker – My favorite magazine. From week to week, you never know what stories you’ll find – wild boars, smallpox, Seymour Hirsch’s latest Iraq war expose, a George Clooney profile. Jenny Allen’s humor essay, Awake, in the June 2, 2008, issue had me laughing out loud.

2. The New York Times – Not for the obvious reasons. I’m a West Coast girl and cut my news teeth on the Los Angeles Times. But when it comes to crosswords, the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzles are the best. I buy spiral-bound volumes at Powell’s Books and take them on plane trips and vacations.

3. I’m usually down on New York-based publishers because too many of them carry stories with sources based in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut and completely ignore the rest of the country. This is especially irritating in shelter magazines that feature page after page of suggestions for doing up your 650-square foot Manhattan apartment but never showcase stunning homes, large or small, in places like Spokane, Washington, or Sacramento, California – for those you have to read Sunset. But now that I’m visiting, I’m glad so many publishers are based here, it makes for an easier trip.

4. Because so many magazines are based here, a lot of writers are based here too. So in my off hours, l’ll be hanging out with a handful of former colleagues I haven’t seen in a while, and getting together with a writer who I’ve worked with for some time but never met in person.

5. The term “media” includes more than just newspapers and magazines – it’s movies too. That’s why I purposely waited to see Sex in the City on the big screen until I was here where all takes place. Somebody get me a cosmo.

What’s your favorite New York media memory?