When I first started as a wrestling writer, there wasn’t any articles giving people just starting advice about wrestling writing and things related to that subject. Here’s some tips about wrestling writer needs when starting their journey on wrestling media.
Journalism
A lot of people think wrestling writers are journalists, but this is further from the truth, while both share some similarities, both are very different jobs and differentiating them is important. Wrestling Journalists are responsable for news for the most part, while writers do things like editorials or opinion pieces for example.
If you’re a writer, you do however need to study at least a little about journalism. Reading books about journalism will help you become a better writer and the structure of articles and other things. If you studied journalism in college, that will be very helpful in your career in more ways than one.
History
Wrestling has a rich history and learning about it will help you. Wrestling just like many things is cyclical and wrestling tends to repeat itself a lot and learning from history is key.
There’s a lot of places where you can learn about wrestling history, from Podcasts to Wikipedia pages. Another good way of studying wrestling history is through old issues of the Observer and Torch newsletters.
Even as a fan, you’ll fall in love even more with pro-wrestling if you study it wonderful and rich history. There’s always something interesting to learn about it. As a side note, don’t watch any documentary related to WWE telling of wrestling history, those are very inaccurate and are the worst possible way to learn wrestling history.
What to Watch and Cover
Wrestling is so massive and there’s always something to write about, for better and worse. I would recommend to watch as most modern and old wrestling as you can, but especially modern wrestling.
The more you watch, the more you’ll be able to write and find your place in wrestling media. This takes time and patience too. This goes back to the point of studying wrestling history.
Promotions like AEW, NJPW and WWE will always generate news, but paying attention to smaller promotions or the indies is key too.
Other Skills
While writing will be one of the most important skills you’ll need, there’s other ones you also should have or are recommended to have. The first one is at least basic knowledge on Photoshop, this will come in handy in a lot of ways. If you can’t afford Photoshop, there’s free alternatives to it that will help you learn the basic stuff like Photopea.
Other skills are video and audio editing, or at least the basics of it. The more of these skills you have, the easier your work will be. Another important skill is listing to your editor, they are the ones that will help you directly improve and tell you what you’re doing right and wrong most of the time.
Social Media
Having social media presence is very important for any writer or journalist in wrestling media. Social media will help you share your work to the world and get feedback about it, this feedback will help you learn and improve as a writer too.
Social media will also help you meet a lot of interesting people in the world of wrestling media and wrestling a s a whole. Social Media and especially wrestling Twitter can be a unpleasant place a lot of times, but there’s also a lot of of writers and journalist willing to help you.
These tips will help you in your journey, hopefully you’ll find this useful throughout your career.
