Chatting With Lucia Peters, Associate Lifestyle Editor at Bustle

By Ariana Marini

Lucia Peters originally thought of writing and editing as a backup career. She got her BA in theatre and her MFA in directing, and held positions in stage managing and directing. But a chance internship posting at The Gloss led to more and more writing opportunities and, eventually, Peters found her backup career had become her full-time gig. Now, at Bustle, she spends her time writing everything from nostalgic 90’s listicles to a piece comparing Donald Trump to Twitter trolls. The Washington D.C.-based writer has also had bylines on Romper (Bustle’s sister site), The Toast, Crushable, and BettyConfidential. We caught up with her to learn more about what it’s like to work at Bustle, how her theater experience has helped her writing, and what the biggest challenges of working at a startup are.

You’ve been working at Bustle for almost three years now. How have you seen the company grow and improve? 

We’ve seen a massive amount of growth over these past three years—honestly it’s astonishing to me how far we’ve come in such a comparatively brief time. When I came aboard, the entire staff was small enough to fit in a single brownstone in Williamsburg; now we’re big enough that our newsroom and offices occupy two floors of an office building in Chelsea.

What are some of the best parts of working at a startup?

Probably the sense of possibility that’s always in the air. We’re encouraged to think big, and although we may not be able to accomplish all those big ideas right at the moment we have them, the perspective is never, “We can’t do that.” It’s “If we could do that, how would we do it?” And there’s a terrific sense of camaraderie and teamwork throughout the entire company, too, which makes all these projects incredibly exciting to work on.

What are some of the challenges? 

It’s a double-edged sword: On the one hand, we do so much, but on the other, we do so much. Part of that is just the nature of the 24-hour news cycle, but part of it is the drive to do the best work we can, whenever we can—with the result being that if the news never stops, well, we don’t really, either. There’s a danger of burning out, so even though it can be hard to do, it’s essential to make sure you carve out at least some time each week where you can unplug.

How has your background in theater helped your writing? 

Having spent so much time on academics definitely helped; my professors in both college and graduate school held the bar high, and they had no tolerance for slackers. If your writing was weak and they knew you could do better, they would absolutely call you out on it.

But the practical side of making plays has been instrumental to how I developed as a writer and editor too. As a director, you learn how to think critically, how to do your research, how to develop a compelling argument or point of view, and how to express that argument or point of view in a way that keeps a conversation going with the audience. That’s what a good piece of writing does, too—you don’t write in a void, the same way you don’t make plays in a void.

What types of articles are you most excited to write?  

When you write on the internet for a living—and particularly when you do it daily, constantly producing a large body of work in the process—not everything you produce is going to be something you feel deeply about. The pieces that are the most exciting to write are the ones that you do feel deeply about—the ones where you find the topic and think, “Yes. I need to write this.”

What’s your favorite published piece that you’ve contributed to? Why?  

I wrote an essay about David Bowie the day news of his death broke. I’m not a great personal essayist—I’m really good at writing about ideas, but I’m markedly less good at writing stories about my own life—but this one meant a lot to me. I’m also fond of my “unpopularopinion” piece about the Sorting Hat. I think we owe it to ourselves to be critical about the media we consume, even media that’s almost universally adored.

What’s something you can’t work or live without? 

I hate working at desks. Seriously. I hate them. I had a similar quirk as a director—I couldn’t direct while seated behind a table. The floor and the chaise bit of my couch are my favorite places from which to write.