New Class: Explore Your Creativity in 2010

Thinking about New Year’s Resolutions? Nope, me either. There are still a ton of holidays to bake for, shop for, decorate for. New Year’s seems a loooong way off.

New Year’s Day is 26 days away. Less than four weeks. New Year’s usually means resolutions. I’ve been against that idea for a long time. Written about it several times.

Julia Cameron's book "Walking In This World"

No sense complaining unless you come up with a solution. What I don’t like about New Year’s resolutions is that they are too vague, too general, aren’t planned with support, and are forgotten in a week. I also think that when we make a resolution we fear the change. Change is hard. Change alone is even harder. So here’s my plan:

1. Do something to explore your creativity. Something focused. Something that gives you support.

2. If you’ve heard of Julia Cameron, you know that she wrote a book called The Artist’s Way–the beginning of creativity coaching. Cameron also wrote a book called Walking in This World–The Practical Art of Creativity. Like The Artist’s Way, it is a support guide for creativity. You don’t need to have read one to get something from the other.

3. I’m going to run an online reading group on Walking In This World. The book has 12 chapters. We will cover one chapter a week, starting on January 12. We’ll read the chapter, do the exercise at the end, and discuss what happened, what we thought, how we progressed each week.  As a creativity coach, I can also tell you that it’s a good way to experience one kind of creativity coaching. It’s a group coaching, but you’ll discover the kind of support for change you’ll find. You don’t have to be an artist, simply want to explore your creativity. Or your fear of your own creativity.

4. I’ll form a Yahoo Group for the class and open a PayPal window so you can pay on my website. The class will meet through the Yahoo Group. You’ll be able to discuss,  post images, ask questions. The class will cost $30, but I’m donating $10 of each registration to the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, a fund for artists who have met with some disaster and need help getting back on their feet. Everyone benefits.

5. After you pay, I’ll send you an invitation to join the group. Be prepared for 13 weeks of work. If your first reaction is that you don’t have time, it’s a perfectly normal. We don’t want to do things for ourselves. We don’t want to commit. But this is not about a grinding class. This is about your creativity and finding some support for it.

The only thing you need to do is buy the book–there is a link to amazon.com on my website. (Or borrow it from the library, but you’ll want to write in it.)  Still think it’s too hard? It’s your gremlin or negative self-talk. Gremlins kick up and tell you what not to do for yourself. You’ll come up with a thousand reasons not to do this for yourself. There is only one reason to do it: it will help you make meaning in your life.

This class also makes an excellent holiday gift. Combined with the purchase of the book, it’s a wonderful jump start gift for a friend’s  creativity.  (To keep it simple, give them the check or cash and the link to join.)

Please join us starting January 12 for this exciting, meaningful work that honors and supports your creativity.

–Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach who trains businesses how to communicate effectively with their clients and helps people who don’t draw or write to keep art journals.

Art Tutorial: Found Poetry Collage

If you like found poetry, you can take it one step further and create a collage with it. A few days ago, I used raw-art techniques for found poetry. Today, I’m using a different method. It’s the journaling version of NaNoWriMo –National Novel Writing Month.

While the “rules” of found poetry say you underline the words, then copy them, I like the idea of cutting out the words and pasting them down. This can get a little tricky if you are using catalogs or magazines. It gives it a visual and textural feel, as well as a heightened realism in the cut-out words.

Here is my most recent venture into found-poetry journaling, a two-page piece, including cut-out. Directions are below the photos. Words of the poem:

Sanctuary

In a seaside town
two minutes from the beach,
you grow up with nothing–
Winters hold razor-sharp edges.
Pearl moon makes the most of its small space
Still big and empty enough for
human-scaled dimensions.

Overleaf (page 1) with moon cutout backed with parchment. You can see part of the poem through the parchment.

Next page. Moon repeats--this is the piece from the previouis page. The letter "M" is large to emphasise the word "moon".

Directions

Materials: Several magazines, catalogs, old books and. . .

• Scissors, craft knife (small box cutter or X-acto knife)
• glue
• tweezers
• parchment paper, cut into 5″ x 8″ pieces.

Method: Read through catalogs, magazines, or an old book that you don’t mind cutting up. When you find a phrase you like, cut it out carefully. Leave a margin around the words you want. It makes it easier to change tenses or capital letters if the new piece overlaps, rather than butts up against, the cut-out piece.

Don’t worry too much if you don’t have perfect sentences. Right now you are gathering. It’s also a good idea to cut out a few extra words. You don’t know yet where this is going, and that’s part of the fun.

In this case, I had drawn a fancy bottle on the page, intending to make the poem about memories–the bottle was a perfume bottle, the idea that scents evoke memories. That was my idea. Poetry’s idea ran away in another direction. That necessitated the cut out page and re-thinking of the design. Leave yourself open till you have the poem. It’s much easier.

Put the strips of paper together, using lines to create phrases.

In some cases, you may want big or fancy letters for the initial capital. You could write them in, or use rubber stamps, but I find the search and cutting method to be more satisfying for this collage.

Trim the larger pieces you have to make just the words you want visible. Now use tweezers to place them as you would collage pieces, to see where you want them.

The glue choice is important. I tried a glue stick, but it doesn’t deposit enough glue and often the paper rips. Thin glue makes the paper too fragile. I like to use a PVA glue and a thin paintbrush. Put the strip face down on the parchment paper, use the tweezers to hold the paper in place, and stroke the glue over in a thin coat. This keeps the glue from oozing out underneath the paper and leaving marks on the page.

Use the tweezers to place the piece of paper, face up, in place. Pat over the entire surface, including corners, with the tweezers. You can use the paintbrush, too. I use plastic instead of painted wood paintbrushes. The paint flakes off the painted wood when you are working with glue and gets in your artwork.

Keep your journal open until the page is completely dry.

––Quinn McDonald is a writer who stands in the middle ground between words and illustrations, believing they both make meaning and create art. © Quinn McDonald, 2009 All rights reserved

Tutorial: Found Poetry, Raw Art

Found poetry is the discovery of hidden words and phrases in text that was written for another purpose entirely–a catalog or magazine article, for example. The poem is not found all together, you’ll find a word here, a few more six lines down.

I find this accidental discovery a perfect match for raw art--which is drawing abstract patterns that are pleasing, exciting, soothing, or engaging. Both are a discovery and both result in the creation of something new.

You can make up a variety of rules to make found poetry more challenging–mine are simple: You choose a set number of pages from a catalog, book, or magazine and find words or phrases that, when cut out and placed next to each other, make poetry. No fair using song lyrics or pieces that are already poetry.

Be careful to cut out words that are grammatically correct in the place you want to use them. That might mean cutting out extra letters. Because you are creating a collage  the words can be different typefaces, sizes or colors.

Then you add raw art–in this case a repetitive topographical pattern, with a suggestion of plant life, to match the seasonal theme of the poetry and to emphasize the word “freedom” and the tribal feel.

Horizon Dust

Time around us moves faster.
The seed that was sown 20 years ago
sweeps into the season raw-edged and tribal.
New growth, striped in rich autumnal hues,
moving to a new feeling and a new freedom
blossoming forth.

All the words in “Horizon Dust” comes from a variety of clothing descriptions in two pages of the Sundance fall catalog.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who stands in the middle ground between words and illustrations, believing they both make meaning and create art. © Quinn McDonald, 2009 All rights reserved

Tutorial: Easy Travel Journal

The journals I like to make best are ones that are multi-purpose and not too big. That way, I can use them in creative ways, fill them up quickly, and make another one. Like most people who make things, I often enjoy the design and creation more than using the actual finished piece. So I always leave room for the possibility of altering my work some more.

Travel journal made of #10 envelopes. You can fill the envelopes with airline tickets, menus from interesting restaurants, receipts,  whatever you want to keep from your trip. You can use one envelope for each day, for each country, for each town.

You can draw or write notes on the envelopes, describing how you got the content of each envelope. Make it before you go, and you won’t lose those small pieces of paper. Make a few, and you won’t run out of envelopes.

Materials: This tutorial uses simple things you already have: cardboard for the cover (I used mat board), number 10 size envelopes, masking tape, bookbinding tape (it’s expensive, you can substitute gaffers tape), cotton thread, a pointy awl and watercolors.

Purpose: This envelope journal has room to write in and room to keep mementos, but that doesn’t mean you can’t draw on it, too.

Assembly: 1. Cut black (or another solid color of mat board) into rectangles slightly larger (about one-fourth inch all the way around) than the envelope you will use. Put them next to each other, long sides together, but about one-quarter inch apart. Cut a piece of gaffers tape* about 2 inches longer than the covers. Center the tape over the covers and place it down gently. Lift the covers, turn them over and smooth down the piece of tape at the top and bottom. Cut another piece of tape to cover the space in between the top and bottom overlaps. Cut it long enough so you have all the sticky part of the tape completely covered.

2. Lay two envelopes, flap side down, in front of you, side by side. They should be about one-eighth inch apart. Tape them together, the long way, using one piece of masking tape. Create three sets of these. If you want to have the envelopes face in different directions, take into account that these pairs of envelopes will nest.

* gaffers tape is the special tape electricians use in theater productions. Not as gooey as duct tape, it makes a cheaper alternative to bookbinding tape, which you can also use.

3. Nest the pairs of envelopes and line up the top and bottom. Place them in the center of the open book covers.

4. Using the awl, or a self-centering screw punch (you get them from a hardware store) punch four evenly spaced holes in the tape between the envelopes and book covers.

5. Thread a tapestry needle with cotton thread. It should be thick enough not to tear. Starting from the back of the book, come up through the top hole. Go down into the next hole, come up through the third hole, and down through the fourth. If you want to make your book sturdier, come back up through the third and work your way to the top. The needle should exit out of hole # 1. Tie the thread off and trim the ends.

6. Decorate the cover. Paint geometric figures on the plain side of the envelopes. Leave enough space for writing.

–Quinn McDonald is an artist, writer and certified creativity coach. She teaches journal making. Images: Quinn McDonald. (c) 2008-9 All rights reserved.

Publishing Your Book: The Book Proposal, Part II

Yesterday, I wrote about getting started writing a book. People have been telling me how “lucky” I am to have a book under consideration, and I thought it would be great to help others do it the same way I did it–step by step. Because it isn’t luck. It’s a lot of hard work. And it’s worth it.

There is a giant truth about writing a book–and it’s good to know before you start. You do not write a book to publish it. You write a book to write well. To say something you wanted to say. If you write a book mainly to get published, you’ll be disappointed no matter what happens.

Book drop

Today, we’re talking about the book proposal and choosing a publisher. At this point, you have a non-fiction book outline–it’s pretty detailed, you could write it by following the outline. You also have 12-24 illustrations to show your point.

1. Write a few chapters. You don’t have to start at Chapter One, but you have to be clear on what you are writing and how it fits into the whole. Finish them, file them, forget them for a week or so. Open the file, read it. Is it still interesting? Does the sequencing seem right?  Does it make you want to write more? Is the grammar right? Show it to someone you know well enough to ask a favor of, but not so well that they will lie to you to keep your friendship. Ask them to follow the steps, see it they get the result you meant.

2. Go to a bookstore to check out similar books. Sure, you can do this online, but you need to get out of the office. Look for books that are similar to yours in content or intent. Is this a how-to? A step-by-step project book? A book for inspiration?  Is it paper arts? Mixed media? It can be more than one thing. Look at the books to see how the chapters are arranged, to see how you react to the material. And then see who published them. Take notes.

3. Look at the list of publishers. Publishers have niches. Your book should fit into their niche. You don’t want to be the author who writes, “When you read my book proposal, you will certainly want to add non-fiction to your publishing goals.” Now check out all the publishers on your list. What do they publish? Cross out all the publishers who specialize in categories your book doesn’t fit into– textbooks, coffee table books, fiction. Cross off all the publishers who want you to write about their ideas for pay. You might want to do that, but you already have a book.

4. Read their website carefully. Most publishers have submissions guidelines somewhere on the website. Don’t submit anything until you find it, read it, and understand it. Then follow it. Publishing companies receive hundreds of proposals. The first way they sort is by people who follow directions. If they take your book, you will have to follow a lot of directions with an editor. Publishers do not willingly buy trouble. Even if you are charming and special.

5. Follow the directions. If they say submissions through agents only, you will need to find an agent. That’s another step. In general, non-fiction writers don’t need agents for their first book. If the guidelines say no submissions through email, follow the instructions. Buy an envelope big enough to return your proposal, and one to hold all the material. Put enough postage on the return envelope to send it back first class.  Make a checklist of all the pieces, there may be several.

6. Write professionally about yourself. You will be asked for a biography, reasons you can write this book better than others, the outline, the illustrations, and some other questions. It is excruciating to write about yourself. Do not include everything you’ve ever done. Don’t write your bio as a poem (particularly if the publisher doesn’t publish poetry). You may need help with this part from a friend who is also a good writer. Oddly enough, a simple, straightforward approach works best.

7. Find a name. Sending your proposal to a person is better than sending it to “submissions.” This is the time to use your social network. Ask if anyone in your network knows a contact. People know people, and this is the time to ask. Phone the publisher and see if you can speak to a real person. It’s not impossible, but you may have to be inventive to get through the menus.

8. An acquisitions editor looks for good ideas to pitch. She or he may read your outline and make suggestions for changes. This is not the time to brush off any ideas but your own. This is not the time to prove that every word you write is golden and untouchable. This is the time to be a good listener. If the suggestion makes sense, offer to make the changes. If you don’t know how the editor’s idea fits with your project, ask. Your decisions make a big difference at this step.

9. Be polite and open to suggestions. The nicest treatment you are going to get is during the back and forth process. Be polite, prompt, and friendly. If you think the ideas won’t work for the book, say so. Be prepared that the editor knows what will work for the audience. If your book won’t, better to know early.

10. Be prepared to wait. Even if an acquisitions editor likes your work, you’ll have to wait. Wait for a proposal meeting, in which the acquisitions editor pitches her book. Each publisher has a different schedule. You could wait a week, a month, a quarter. It’s fair to ask how long the wait is, it’s not fair to email-stalk the acquisitions editor.

11. As soon as the wait begins, keep busy. See if you need to do more research. Prepare more illustrations. Think about the next book idea. Do NOT think about what you should have done differently. Now is the time to keep looking ahead, not back.

Be prepared for people to tell you how “lucky” you are–as if the book that’s been six years in the writing took a month or so. If you haven’t talked about your book a lot–a good idea to keep your ideas focused–people don’t know how long you have been working at it. Almost all “overnight success” stories have a five-year start-up. But it’s fair to tell people that luck had nothing to do with it. It takes a lot of work to write a book, and it’s fine to say so.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has a website for writers who want to keep an art journal, and a website for her business training. Both have coaching sections.

Publishing Your Book: Step-by-Step to Getting “Lucky”, Part I

Right after I celebrated having an acquisitions editor express interest in my book, friends started congratulating me in sort of an odd way.

“You are SO lucky to be able to write a book and get interest right away.”

From school.discoveryeducation: http://tinyurl.com/yzjs7z9

“Aren’t you lucky to get interest in your first book so fast!”

“I could write a book too, but I don’t have time.”

“I’ve written a book, but it’s not ready to go out yet.”

“Ive been working on my book for years. I’m just not as lucky as you.”

You, too, can do exactly what I did, and I’m going to tell you how I did it, step by step. No secrets. No holding back. First, truth in disclosure: I do not yet have a contract. I had an acquisitions editor express interest. There is still the giant leap to acceptance. More about that part later. First, the step by step.

1. Write every day for 50 years. I wrote my first book when I was seven years old, in a spiral notebook. (It didn’t get published.) I’ve been writing almost every day since.

2. Take on different writing assignments. I wrote my first published book when I was 30. It was a “book for hire” deal. I hated it. It wasn’t my idea, it was me writing about someone else’s idea for pay. Since that time, I’ve written for ad agencies, PR firms, financial institutions, insurance companies, huge manufacturing companies, small struggling businesses. I’ve worked at a newspaper, at a magazine, at an editorial think tank. I’ve written for people I agreed with and people I despised. On topics I loved and topics so boring, watching the barometer drop was more interesting. But I wrote. Now, fast-forward to this book.

3.  Find a topic that fascinates, mesmerizes and fires you up. Mine was One Sentence Journaling. (Here’s an article I wrote about it last March.) I have notes that go back six years, but I organized and taught the course four years ago. Each time I taught it, I took notes, listened to comments and changed the course to see if it improved.

4. Do the same thing with two more topics: find topic you really like, develop a course, teach it, listen to feedback, change parts of it until you feel it is a good course that people will pay to attend. (This helps you gauge interest in the material.)

5. Once you’ve taught it in person, teach it online, to make sure you have written exercises that are clear and make sense. Teaching a class online takes about 8 x the length of time it takes to teach the class in prep, set-up, running and comments.

6. Examine the classes and discover a new path to the same information. This is called discovering another perspective. Not everyone learns the same way. You are broadening your audience. As you teach other classes, see what people wish they could develop their creativity to do, what they are missing in their lives, how they can make meaning. Take lots of notes. Be willing to be confused and not know what to do next.

7. Stay open to new ideas. Mine  hit me during morning walking meditation. It was a good idea but it doesn’t hang together with the rest of the material. Be willing to spend months trying out ideas, messing up, failing, starting over, trying, polishing, until one day you are too exhausted to care anymore. You put the idea aside. The next day, in the shower, you have an idea. It fits! You work another three months fitting it into the writing portion.

8. Blend the new ideas and put them in front of your audience. In my case, that was the beginning of raw-art journaling.   Blend the new approach with the old, turning it into the same step, so people who learned visually, auditorially (by hearing), and kinesthetically (by moving),  could learn.  Create a ton of examples. Create a website. Listen to comments from people who like and don’t like your website. Think them through. Be willing to be wrong, to fail again.

9. Develop a class that combines the final version of your idea. Teach this class and all the variations 10 times, each time making changes that improve the class. Listen to feedback, criticism, questions, and people who tell you it’s weird. Ignore the last one. Note on teaching: It will not make you rich. Do not teach to make money. Teach to try out your ideas, to spread your discoveries, to get better teaching. Teaching is not about you, it’s about the participants.

10. Gather up all your notes and create an outline for a book. Do this while running your own business, because no one pays you for this stage. Work on the outline until it looks like information people would pay to play with.

You now have reached the stage where you can write a book proposal. At this point, I’ve spend 50 years writing almost every day, and six years in some stage of book development. I haven’t started writing the book yet, although every shred of it has been taught and evaluated.

Tomorrow: How to write  a book proposal and find a publisher.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has a website for writers who want to keep an art journal, and a website for her business training. Both have coaching sections.

 

PowerPoint: Stories, Not Bullets

Not everyone who can make type on a keyboard is a writer. Writing is a skill that’s learned through practice. Writing well isn’t easy and it doesn’t come naturally. So I teach people how to write.  Clearly. Concisely. How to give presentations. How to write the presentations they give, using PowerPoint.

Poor PowerPoint. It’s been so misused, I may have to open a shelter for abused PowerPoint

Seth Godin's book is a starting point for help, but it won't write your presentation for you.

presentations. You know them–the ones with overloaded slides. With charts that need an engineer and an explanation to make sense. With all those bullet points.

You thought bullet points were the cure, right? You thought they were the solution to bad PowerPoint. Nope. They are one of the ways to ruin a PowerPoint presentation

Although I teach a full-day course on writing and designing effective PowerPoint presentations, here are  five quick tips on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. Today. If you follow these five steps your next PowerPoint will be better than your last.

1.Don’t do what you hate seeing. What do you hate about other people’s PowerPoint presentations? Write down the three worst things people do. Then don’t do any of them. The ones I see most often are: too many bullets, no story development, horrible design.

2. PowerPoint was never designed to be report-writing software. Using it that way will ruin your presentation and give you a lousy report at the same time. PowerPoint was designed to have engineers talk to marketing. It’s a presentation software. Use it for that. What about the report? Well, if you do your presentation right, you will also be able to generate the report, but not in the same step.

3. Start with the story. Don’t start by opening PowerPoint and designing the slide. That’s not the story. If you start creating your presentation by opening PowerPoint, you get caught up in design instead of story. Presentations are always about the story. PowerPoint is a presentation aid. It helps you add visuals and emphasis, helps people remember what you said, influences their thinking, but it cannot be the content-carrier. Providing content is your job. How do you write a good story? Best way to start is to ask yourself: What do I want the people to think/do/believe when I’m done?

4. Stop using bullets. Most bullet points are unrelated topic headings that presenters use to know what to say next. That information belongs in the “Notes” section of PowerPoint. If you’ve never heard of the Notes section, don’t do another presentation until you’ve learned the good side of this powerful software. Most people put information that belongs in Notes on the screen. That’s the fast track to losing your audience.

5. Use images that help tell your story. For example, which makes you more interested in the topic of “Summertime home repairs”–a slide that reads:

Tips for Summertime Home Repairs

• Time home repairs to suit the heat
• Don’t paint wood that gets full sun in a.m.
• Wood will warp when sun dries paint

A picture adds to your words in ways explanations cannot.

Or seeing this photo, while the presenter says, “Home repair is tricky when it gets hot. Wood soaks up paint. The sun dries it, but it also warps it, giving you a white picket fence that needs braces.”

The objection I hear most often is, “Well, where do I get pictures I can afford?” It always makes me smile. It makes me realize that most people write PowerPoint with only half the tools–words, but no photos or planned images.

Often the words are as poorly planned as the images, but words are free, so they are made to substitute for images.

In the day-long class, we look at your past PowerPoints and see what went wrong, learn what a PowerPoint can (and can’t) do for you and for the audience, dig for the purpose of your presentation, learn the basics of telling a story, choosing effective colors for your presentation, how to find and use photos, designing charts and graphs for presentations (because you can’t use the same one you used in the report), and, yes, when to use bullets in your presentation. You’ll learn the five biggest mistakes and how to avoid them, when to use a slide and how to use PowerPoint to make your presentation work for you, rather than be your presentation that you are enslaved to delivering.

--Quinn McDonald is a writing instructor who helps people design and give powerful presentations. See all of her training topics. (c) QuinnCreative, Quinn McDonald, 2009

Lie, Lay Grammar Tip

You look at your dog, command, “Lay down!” and your dog does nothing. Great! The dog knows grammar and he knows you’re wrong.

The number of people who don’t know when to use “lay” or “lie” is climbing as fast as the birth rate. In the past week I’ve heard a politician, a teacher, a minister, and a newsreader on NPR get it wrong. NPR! The last fortress of correct English! I hear a giant toilet flushing, we are all going down the drain.

Aren’t sure when to use ‘lay’ and ‘lie’? You certainly aren’t alone. Here are three ways, neither involve any grammar. I won’t make  you diagram sentences, either.

1. The lazy way. Use ‘lie’ all the time. You’ll be wrong only a tiny fraction of the time.

2. The substitute way. Fool yourself and substitute “sit” or “set” in the sentence. It makes it easier. If you use ’sit’ then you can use ‘lie,’ if you are sure it’s ’set’ then you can use ‘lay.’

Here are some examples for sit/lie: Sit down. When I came in, he was sitting on the floor. Let’s sit down together and figure it out.

Here are some examples for set/lay: Please set the bowl on the table. Set your tired bones on that chair, let’s sit and talk for a while. Once you set down the wine glass, pick up a pretzel.

2. The easy way. ‘Lie’ means to recline. You want your dog to recline, so you say, “Lie down!” You are tired so you lie down for a nap. The paper is lying next to the pen.

‘Lay’ means to place. ‘Lay the pen on the table.’ You then lay the paper next to it. You can even pick up your dog and lay him on the table, too, because you are doing the placing. And finally, when you place yourself in bed, you can say, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.” Notice you are adding ‘me’ to the sentence, you are placing yourself. If you were reclining, it would be, ‘Now I lie down to sleep.’

Listen up, Doreen, Tandaleo, Sidsel, Sarah, Lisa. You can do this. I know you can, because you lay it on the line for us every day.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and trainer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007-9 All rights reserved. Diagram of “Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep” courtesy logos.com

Tutorial: Easy Index-Card Journal

Tyvek journal cover

Network Your Way to Anything

Here’s the good news: you can network your way to a new job, to being interviewed on radio or TV, to a quote in the newspaper, to teaching an art class. Yes, you can.

Here’s the bad news: there is no master list of opportunities with names, phone numbers and urls that make it easy. No one will show up at your front door with a limo and whisk you off to fame, much less fortune. To network your way along, you are going to have to do a lot of hard work for a long time. There are no shortcuts, no instant gratification.

Now that I’ve lost most of the readers. . . if you are still reading, you are the one I want to talk to. Luann Udell, a friend and gifted colleague, share an experience that I’ve written about before that demonstrates the results of networking. You work your brains out for years, volunteering, pushing a project, researching, showing up, waving your hand. When you are almost dead from exhaustion, the interview falls into place . . .and appears in the paper. It’s good. And you get a hundred grumpy calls and emails that all start, “You are so lucky. . . .”

Easy street via keded.wordpress.com

Here are the steps to networking your way to success:

1. Start with a project you are deeply interested in and know a lot about. Yes, you start with what you know best and are deeply interested in.

2. Decide who you want to reach and what the goal is. This is an important step–if you don’t know what you want, no one else will, either. “Successful” isn’t  clear enough. What is success for you? Getting the interview? Knowing  a celebrity? Making a potful of money? Write down what success is for you. Once things start happening, you forget. Let’s say you want an interview on a radio, TV station or newspaper.

3. Do research. Let’s say your goal is to be interviewed on your topic. Research every radio station in your area. Community radio, internet radio, dig ‘em all up. Use Google, get on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Ask people you know.  Go to the library. Ask there. Once you have a list of potential stations,  look them all up to see what they say about themselves. If your expertise is Celtic instruments, you can skip over the stations that focus on politcal talk shows.  Look for shows at odd times–early morning, Sundays, late at night. Find out who the disk jockey is. Listen to the show.

Cave Creek sign, photographed by Q. McDonald

4. Act on your research. Phone the station and ask who the producer of the show is. Be prepared to ask for what you want in a direct way. “I have a collection of Celtic Instruments and I thought it might be interesting to Dee Jockey because she has a Celtic radio show on Sunday mornings at 5 a.m. Yesterday she played a series of songs written for the Uilleann pipes, and I’m an expert. I wonder if she would be interested in interviewing me about the resurgence in pipe popularity.” Yes, I’m using odd example—to other people, your expertise may sound odd.

4. While you are waiting for fame, talk to other people. All the time. Waiting in the grocery store, in the movie lines, at the bank and post office. Listen more than talk. Who are these people? What do they know? Listen your brains out. Ask for cards if the people interest you, even if they don’t have a job or an interview for you. Stay in touch through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. That’s how you build your list of people to follow.

5. Write useful, interesting articles on your blog. Answer every comment. Be nice even when you don’t feel like it. At this point you are the Little Red Hen–doing all the work. That’s OK. 

6. Volunteer or do a project around your area of expertise. This is a project you choose because you need to learn something or want to talk to more people. Do more listening. Sometime around now, people will ask you to do work for free. Become discerning. Don’t believe everyone who tells you about “great marketing opportunities.” Great marketing opportunities are rare. They should put you in front of your eager audience. They should produce qualified leads.

7. Around this time, you will have some good opportunities show up. A producer will return your call and set up an interview. Show up for them. Be on time, be polite, do your best work. After the interview, follow up with a nice email or note. Get the card of everyone you talk to. Have your own cards ready.

8. Make the most of your interview. Get tear sheets, a recording, a video. Promote it on your website.

9. Reach out to the program chair of groups that might be interested in your work. Speak to groups. Be interesting. Get paid.  Send them to your website for more information. Post good tutorials on your website.

10. Once you have done all this, you will begin to see success. People will call you for favors, for speaking gigs, for information. Help others, keep track of the people you meet and who are in your field. Don’t give away your expertise to just anyone. Be selective. Ask to be paid for your worth. Don’t be greedy.

And that’s how it works. I wish there were a secret, but for most of us, success comes from hard work, showing up, being prepared, working our skills, learning as much as we can, being nice and listening. It’s neither simple or easy, but it works. If it doesn’t work, do more of it till it does.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and training developer in writing and soft skills. She assumes she’ll get some snarky comments to this post complaining that it didn’t offer any shortcuts or sure things. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. © Quinn McDonald, 2009. All rights reserved.