First, don't become homeless, not for a second. Don't be a dilettante and temporarily live among the homeless in a tent, RV or doghouse and then use that experience to gin up an agent query or grant application. Then again, such posing could help you land the big book deal and the streaming show. You also don't need a writer's retreat in a forested setting to become a writer who writes about the homeless. You already have the perfect spot to write about the homeless—the bleachers at the ball fields across the street from your neighborhood homeless encampment. You just turn the other way and write and stories unfold in real time. Nothing like writing in real time!
Admit it! You'll never hit the big score with this subject; there is no such hope with anything you write. But you will write about it nonetheless. You didn't choose the subject, it chose you
What you do have going for you is the knowledge there is something new under the sun with this current American homeless crisis. You see it. You've talk with it. Now write a new way about it and never assume you know anything.
While writing about the homeless crisis, don't shape the story like a foreign correspondent covering a war. There is a war going on in America to cover, and you are part of it because your country is America, and you must not become emotionally detached like so many New Yorker writers are, or delude yourself with objectivity. Use your heart. Write from the heart.
It is important that you don't align yourself with any advocacy group because then you will become a combination of parrot and ostrich, That combination is terrible for originality but it often opens doors to publication.
You should also take a lot of what homeless people tell you with a shaker of salt. No one has special access to the truth in this story, or any story for that matter. Remember that.
Disdain all conventional wisdom. Experiment with multiple writing genres to convey this story. Choose one, two or three genres, then abandon them all and invent something new or rip off something old! You belong to no genre. You belong to no one. You can't. You will go on guts and intuition.
Second, avoid a substance abuse problem while writing on this subject. But, if you're offered a belt of Old Crow by homeless book club reading Bukowski, you damn well better take it. Don't be a phony!
To quote the writer Lorrie Moore, “Decide faces are important.” And they are with this subject. The American faces of the homeless you've seen are nothing like you've seen before. You want to know why they look the way they do and you don't want to make up the reasons.
Why write? It's fucked up. It's awful. It's pure travesty, pure farce. But something else rumbles in the homeless crisis. You don't precisely know what it is at this point, but you keep spelunking, or excavating with a butter knife, or snorkeling into sewage treatment plants, or making calls on landlines. One day, you might know.
Good one!