Networking

Let’s talk about networking. If you just groaned or felt queasy, this post is for you.

If you hate the idea of networking, then you’re probably wrong about what networking actually means. Maybe you think networking is about being insincere or using people. Maybe you have a mental image of walking into a room of strangers and pushing yourself and your product.

Don’t do that.

No one likes those people, that’s awful.

What is Networking?

Networking is actually quite simple and not intimidating at all. Basically, networking is introducing yourself to people, then being nice to them. Not in a fake way, in a genuine way. Say hello to people, then be nice. If either of those things strike you as overly difficult, you might need to sit down and have a think about why that is.

You’re not aiming to use people, or sell your product. You’re just getting to know people in your industry and giving them a chance to get to know you. It’s different from a friendship, in that you don’t talk about personal issues or come to these people for support when you get dumped. However, you should still be friendly.

What is the goal of networking?

The goal is mutual benefit. Mutual being the key word. Simply having a familiarity with the industry and people in it is usually beneficial in itself. If someone says to me “Do you know Kirstie Olley, she’s the president of vision writers?” I will say: “Yes, I am vice president, Kirstie and I go way back.” Instantly, that shared familiar contact will make the other person feel safer and happier talking to me.

Like it or not, publishing is an industry of people who want to work with people they like. Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. But it does mean the more people like you, the more likely they will want to work with you, or recommend you to other people.

I got my first publishing contract with Harlequin hardly knowing anyone and none of my contacts helped me at all. However, everything since then—publishing contracts, speaking gigs, contract work of other kinds, has all come in through acquaintances and networking.

You don’t need to be friends with everyone, but it really, really helps.

Remember this is a two-way street. It’s up to you to speak highly of your acquaintances, and perhaps share their books, let them guest post when they are doing book tours and share opportunities you hear about and so on.

How do we network successfully?

If you’re shy about approaching people, remember you don’t have to approach everyone. Start small. Approach someone else who looks lonely and intimidated and say: “Hello, my name is Talitha.” And offer your hand. Depending on where you are and what the event is, you might say: ‘Are you here as a reader or a writer?’ or ‘How do you know the host?’. If appropriate, you can just start with a casual compliment: ‘I love those earrings’ or ‘I love your shirt, Wonder Woman is my favourite superhero’.

Only use a compliment if you know how to give one. For example, don’t say: “You’re really pretty.” Or “Wow, you’re the hottest boy/girl/banana here.” That’s not a compliment, that’s hitting on someone and its 99% likely to be annoying and rude.

Assuming you open the conversation with a sane, pleasant introduction, there should be a reasonable and polite conversation that is relevant to the event and the things around you.

However, networking is not about being overly agreeable. One of the key elements of networking is being memorable. That means being polite, but having standards and opinions. Don’t just agree with everyone for the sake of getting along, but don’t argue with someone either.

For example, if you are talking to someone and they say something racist, don’t get into a fight about it. Say something like: “I disagree, pardon me.” And just walk away. You want to show you have integrity and standards, you don’t want to make enemies.

Don’t trash things or people others love either. If someone is raving about something you find annoying, like a TV show, simply say: “Oh, I have friends who like it, but I never really got into it.” This is good, because it says, ‘we can still be friends, even if we don’t both love Gossip Girl.’

And I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t put people down if they are less experienced than you. Someone just had their first short story published? Celebrate that with them. Buy them a drink, tell them congratulations. They deserve it.

Who should I network with?

You know who we all want to be friends with? Our favourite authors. However, these are not the people to network with. As a general rule, I say network with everyone. You never know who is going to suddenly rise to the top, so don’t dismiss people who are ‘less known’ than you. Firstly, it makes you an asshole and secondly, it’s stupid.

Also, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started talking to someone who looked lost and daggy at a cocktail event or morning tea and found out they are some super important guest speaker. I’ve also make friends with people who are still in uni, only to have them graduate and become acquisitions editors at major publishing houses. People I spent a few years giving feedback to have become massively popular authors.

Your peers are the next round of big names and the big names already have lots of people trying to network with them. They aren’t going to be grateful if you share their new release, but a first-time author will be and they’ll remember you when you’re trying to sell your manuscript.

Most of the people I network with will never be famous authors or big name editors. But even if I could see the future, it wouldn’t change who I talked to, because I genuinely enjoy talking to everyone. I’ve never gone in thinking: ‘I want to make friends with an acquisition editor’. I go in thinking: ‘I want to meet some new people and make a good impression, I want to have a good time with these people’.

The enemy of my enemy…

I don’t love everyone. There are a few people I see regularly at conventions that I politely avoid. I would never bad-mouth them. Bad-mouthing anyone is pretty much social suicide in such a small, friendly community like Australian publishing. And while most people generally like me, I am sure there are a few people who politely avoid me too. That’s fine, I really don’t mind at all. I’m sorry about whatever I did to offend them, but I’m not losing sleep.

Approach networking with the aim of being genuine and having a good time. But remember everyone else should be having a good time too.

Don’t say: “Well, I am who I am and if people don’t like it, they can shove off.” You sound like a child. You’re that kid on the floor in the supermarket screaming because his mother won’t buy chocolate. This is a public space, show some goddamn restraint.

And if you are one of those people who feels like they are being deceptive or worries other people are judging them, you need to let that go. You’re not being deceptive, as long as you are genuine. Other people are networking for the same reason. You’re not a phoney or pretending to be something you’re not. We’re all in the same boat and most of us are bailing out the same water with the same leaking buckets.

Someone might be more experienced than you, but no one is inherently ‘better’ than you because of it.

Final tip:

Oh, and the best networking tip of all? Easily accessible business cards.

Get nice cards printed and keep them in your pocket or the easiest part to get to of your purse. When you are saying goodbye to someone, say: “It was nice talking to you, do you have a business card? Do you want mine?”

This will help you remember who you spoke to and remind you to add them on twitter or facebook later on.

Business cards, never leave home without them, folks.

I hope this has given you a clearer idea of what networking is, why we do it and how to go about it. If you have further questions, please email them to me and I’ll address them in future blog posts. I look forward to networking with you soon!

Divergent Thinking and Writing Books

What is divergent thinking?

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking) says: "Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions." For example, if I asked you how to bake a cake, you can probably recognise there are thousands of cake recipes. However your instructions will probably include spoons, bowls and an oven. What if we use clay? What if we use lava to cook? What if we make an 'oven' using a super hot car in the sun in summer?

Sir Ken Robinson did an excellent talk on the subject which can be found here, on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzBa-frc2JA) which I highly recommend. The most important part, in relation to this blog post, is the section about the test they did on schoolchildren, examining their divergent thinking abilities. It found that children are best at divergent thinking in kindergarten and progressively lose the ability as they age. Ken hypothesises it is conditioned out of us by the school system and I agree.

You will always be punished for divergent thinking by peers.

For a short period, when I was 12, I went to a very fancy private school. I did not thrive there.

For mother's day, we were instructed to paint pots. An art teacher came in and gave us very direct lessons on how to paint the pots. The body of the pot was to be white, the rim coloured, then we were to paint a specific flower pattern on the white part. All of the pots would be virtually identical. Pretty, but mass produced.

I had a much more interesting idea for my pot. A sort of Inca mosaic. However when I tried to bring it to life, I realised we had not been given the right colours to realise my goals. We only had the white, the purple and small dabs of the 'flower' colours.

My pot did not turn out well. However out of the 28 pots painted that day, it was the only original. All the pots were on display at the front of the class and after a week of listening to my classmates ruthlessly mock both me and the pot, I quietly asked for paint in a lunch break and painted it white. With a purple rim. There was no time to add the flowers before I gave it to my mother.

I was glad about ten years later when she threw it away.

And so I learned, as we all do, that divergent thinking is a punishable offence when dealing with peers.

However I refused to stop. Every activity we were given, I found an alternative way to do it. Steadfast, through all the bullying. To this day I regret caving in. I regret painting over my ugly pot.

However you will be applauded when it works.

Around the same time, I went to an art workshop run by a very famous aboriginal painter. There was about 100 students there. This man's art sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and, as an example, he painted a killer whale on cardboard, right in front of us.

We were then all given paints and told to paint something. The artist would then judge our entries and the winner would get to take home the painting he had just created.

I watched everyone around me try and copy his whale. Poorly. I knew I couldn't copy his whale and I didn't want to. I think I painted a crocodile, in the style of the cave paintings I grew up around at Laura and Aurukun.

I could hear the kids around me mocking me as I painted. "Look at what she's doing! It's not even a whale!" You'd have thought I was eating the goddamn paint. I didn't care. I never wanted to copy, only to create.

I won.

And that was when I learned a second valuable lesson. The people at the top don't want clones. Divergent thinking will be rewarded when it works.

Divergent thinking rarely works.

You might be thinking: 'I bet your pot was better than the other pots and kids were just jealous'. No one was jealous of that pot. It was the ugliest pot ever painted. Mostly because I didn't have the resources I needed. Had I been more experienced, I could have worked with what was there. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and it was a hideous pot.

When I tried to make up my own swimming stroke at the school swimming carnival and my team lost, it was great divergent thinking, but a terrible time and place to test my theories. I was bullied for that too. So much, I remember the teacher having to pull another student off me who was trying to rip out my hair.

This all applies in a general sense to writing too. New genres, odd stories, things that 'break the mold', most of them suck. Then, sometimes they don't. Harry Potter springs to mind, and Blair Witch Project. Along with any other book or movie that 'spawned its own genre.'

Divergent thinking and you.

When you were five, you were really good at divergent thinking. I'm still pretty good at divergent thinking, but I don't expect you to be. I was spared the conditioning largely due to staying out of traditional schooling models as a child and partly because I lack a certain capacity for empathy that means I am largely unaffected by others. It has pros and cons.

You probably don't want to be good at divergent thinking for the same reasons I am. However it is important you realise once you were good at it, and that you are now bad at it because you were punished for it. Brutally. For years and years.

Now, when you feel a divergent idea coming on, you probably suppress it. Quickly. You quickly tell yourself it's too different, too odd, unmarketable. Whatever. You're really just trying to spare yourself the pain of what you have experienced in the past. Don't touch fire, fire is hot. Don't be too original, originality will be punished.

The problem is, if you see 'failure' as punishment, you're probably going to keep being punished. Because while divergent thinking leads to a lot of ideas, odd, original and new ideas, that doesn't mean they're good. In fact, they're probably not. But that is okay.

The key to winning with divergent thinking isn't to hope it's going to be successful, it's to say: 'Okay, this is likely to flop, but what if we tried it this way?' and be okay with the outcome, whatever it is.

For me, divergent thinking is about creation, curiosity and enjoyment. I enjoy the act of finding out if something works. The outcome is less important. Which is probably why I love writing, but am a bit blasé about actually selling books. They tend to go to whichever editor asks me for something.

And you know what those editors say when they read whatever handed them? 'Different' and 'not what I was expecting'. Which most of us are conditioned to think of as insults. They also say 'exciting' and 'loved it' and 'original'.

Which is nice. I love positive feedback. However I'm usually off painting another ugly pot by then.

Tag's Introduction to Co-Authoring

Many people are flabbergasted by my high word counts. Few realise the bulk comes from projects I am writing with my co-author, Meg. We regularly do 100, 000 new words a month and we divide the word count 50/50, giving us 50, 000 words each, on top of what we have done on personal projects.

So I wanted to do a blog post about co-authoring this week. This is just a short introduction to the pros and cons, and how Meg and I do things, which is different to most other co-author teams.

Four things to remember:

Firstly, you need to realise that co-authoring relationships sit somewhere on a sliding scale between best friends and strictly business. Where you are on that scale will depend on you and your co-author, but you have to be on the same page.

Secondly, if there is anything writing/business related you feel uncomfortable talking to your co-author about, DON’T WORK WITH THAT PERSON. You need to be able to discuss rights, money, editing duties, plot structure/twists, character motivations, all of it. Bones to polish. If you don’t feel you can speak up about something, you either can’t work with people in general, or you can’t work with that person, depending on why you feel you can’t talk about that issue.

Thirdly, you need to have a really good method of dealing with conflict. What that is will vary depending on the people involved, but it needs to be quick and painless. No sulking, no manipulation, no hidden agendas. If you can’t stay level-headed and compromise, don’t co-author. Because there WILL be conflicts. Constantly. But they won’t feel like fights or debates if you have good communication and conflict resolution skills.

Fourthly, you need a contract. It needs to be a signed contract, which you wrote together, both completely agree on and both completely understand. It needs to cover rights, right reversions, money distribution, what happens if one of you dies, what happens if you have an irrevocable falling out, etc. Plan for all the worst case scenarios you can imagine, even if they seem impossible. If you don’t want to talk about those things and put them in a contract, once again, don’t co-author.

So how do Meg and I actually do the work?

You should know our first drafts are embarrassingly rough, full of unnecessary fluff, poorly written, full of plot holes and littered with abandoned sub-plots. So the majority of the work happens in the editing stage. And that’s fine and normal.

When writing a first draft, one of us comes up with the idea for the plot and setting and they we are each assigned characters to control/direct. We then take turns writing scenes, passing them back and forth all day. Often, the non-plotting writer has no idea where the story is going, and only has information about the next few scenes. It’s the back and forth that gets us the high word count. We’re excited to see what happens next, so we want to write our own section to see what the other will say. Because the sections we are writing are quite short, there is only a small amount of work before we get a reward—the next part of the story. Because we always share 1:1, we’re constantly motivated, all day, to write a little more. One more scene. One more page.

Obviously, for this to work, you have to be very enthusiastic about the other author’s writing. You also have to be very excited about the plot. What Meg and I have done is essentially gamified writing. So writing becomes a process we are slowly working on, between other things, all day. Seven AM to seven PM, averaging 300 words an hour, gives us 3600 each a day. Which, doubled, gives us the aforementioned 100k a month.

This may sound huge, but you need to understand this is a side thing—a quick 300 words between doing a load of dishes and a load of washing for me. And Meg manages her words, even while working full time. 

The editing process is a whole other animal. We read through the first draft alone and make notes. Then we come together and discuss those notes. Then the first writer does the developmental edits/second drafting. The developmental edits are handed to the second writer to give feedback, and we come together to discuss changes we want to make based on that feedback. When we are happy with the second draft, the second writer does line edits and polish.

Our method will be successful for very few people. I would even hesitate to recommend it to others. It is rare, particularly in younger folk, to have two people who are not only close enough to talk for 12 hours every single day, but who are also be capable of a sensible business relationship.

That said, working with another author can be one of the most rewarding and fun writing experiences there is. I sincerely hope to be working with Meg for many decades to come and look forward to opportunities to work with other writers in the future.

Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary pursuit and having someone else equally invested in a project gives it double the drive, double the love and double the experience. Don’t ever be afraid to give it a try.