Writing Your Foot in the Door
Today a friend asked me a couple of questions, and it occurred to me that other folks might appreciate hearing the answers.
Q: "I wish I could get invited to [events] but I haven't published any 'authoritative' articles or books."
Well, there are different ways, including...
* Make friends with people in your target field. So then when folks are in charge of organizing an event or activity, they think, "Gee, who do I know that might be willing to do a presentation for this?" and might think of you.
* Attend events, go to activities, and again talk to people. Make insightful comments. You get known for being interested in the topic and having smart things to say about it; people may invite you to be a presenter.
* Watch for events. Contact the organizers and just offer to do a presentation. This is usually easiest at medium-sized events: small ones only need a handful of presenters, while large ones get swamped with volunteers and can afford Big Name Pros.
* On the topic of volunteering, go to an event and just say, "Hi, I've got a couple of spare hours; is there anything you need volunteers for?" This is a brilliant way to make friends with overworked organizers, and you never know what you'll wind up learning. There's a non-zero chance of getting plunked into programming at the last minute, if you've got public-speaking experience -- people do get sick or miss their plane.
* Build your credits. Maybe you could offer to do a talk at your local library or college. Or you could write an article for a magazine, a well-known blog, or some other venue that's relatively easy to break into.
Q: "How do you write about stuff that is obvious to you?"
That's one of the things that comes naturally to me, though apparently it's a rare skill.
* Often, I start with a question from somebody, like the one above. Other times I think about what people have repeatedly asked me, or what things I've tried to look up and realized there wasn't a good concise reference for.
* Then I look at what I do. I break it down into parts. I think about how best to organize the parts -- chronologically, spacially, topically, etc. I start sketching an outline.
* I also try to think of mistakes that can be made, and how to avoid them; and subtle points that can save a lot of work or trouble if you do them.
* I consider my intended audience and their level of understanding with this topic. Are they totally new? I have to explain everything. Are they already doing it, but want to do it better? I need to look for things that the usual guides don't cover, or explain poorly. (My book Composing Magic included basic to intermediate instructions on "how to write" and was consistently praised for being more clear and useful at that, compared to whatever of the bazillion other writing books the reviewers had read.) Are they coming from a different but related field? I need to show what carries over and what doesn't.
* Sometimes it helps to gather information, input, or feedback from other folks who are doing whatever I'm writing about. I might ask them questions, ask for quotes or examples, show them a partial draft, etc.
* I write a rough draft. Then I read through that to make sure the steps are small enough, there are few or no unwritten assumptions, and everything is in a logical order. (It wasn't until I'd been writing my own recipes for a while, and then looked at some commercial cookbooks, that I realized how badly some writers do at just putting things in order!) This makes sure that when somebody reads the piece, they get the foundational data first and then they can go through the steps and actually do what I'm describing, without having to double back too much. This is also a good time to check vocabulary -- if anything might be too obscure, it needs an inline definition or (if the piece is long enough) a glossary.
Q: "I wish I could get invited to [events] but I haven't published any 'authoritative' articles or books."
Well, there are different ways, including...
* Make friends with people in your target field. So then when folks are in charge of organizing an event or activity, they think, "Gee, who do I know that might be willing to do a presentation for this?" and might think of you.
* Attend events, go to activities, and again talk to people. Make insightful comments. You get known for being interested in the topic and having smart things to say about it; people may invite you to be a presenter.
* Watch for events. Contact the organizers and just offer to do a presentation. This is usually easiest at medium-sized events: small ones only need a handful of presenters, while large ones get swamped with volunteers and can afford Big Name Pros.
* On the topic of volunteering, go to an event and just say, "Hi, I've got a couple of spare hours; is there anything you need volunteers for?" This is a brilliant way to make friends with overworked organizers, and you never know what you'll wind up learning. There's a non-zero chance of getting plunked into programming at the last minute, if you've got public-speaking experience -- people do get sick or miss their plane.
* Build your credits. Maybe you could offer to do a talk at your local library or college. Or you could write an article for a magazine, a well-known blog, or some other venue that's relatively easy to break into.
Q: "How do you write about stuff that is obvious to you?"
That's one of the things that comes naturally to me, though apparently it's a rare skill.
* Often, I start with a question from somebody, like the one above. Other times I think about what people have repeatedly asked me, or what things I've tried to look up and realized there wasn't a good concise reference for.
* Then I look at what I do. I break it down into parts. I think about how best to organize the parts -- chronologically, spacially, topically, etc. I start sketching an outline.
* I also try to think of mistakes that can be made, and how to avoid them; and subtle points that can save a lot of work or trouble if you do them.
* I consider my intended audience and their level of understanding with this topic. Are they totally new? I have to explain everything. Are they already doing it, but want to do it better? I need to look for things that the usual guides don't cover, or explain poorly. (My book Composing Magic included basic to intermediate instructions on "how to write" and was consistently praised for being more clear and useful at that, compared to whatever of the bazillion other writing books the reviewers had read.) Are they coming from a different but related field? I need to show what carries over and what doesn't.
* Sometimes it helps to gather information, input, or feedback from other folks who are doing whatever I'm writing about. I might ask them questions, ask for quotes or examples, show them a partial draft, etc.
* I write a rough draft. Then I read through that to make sure the steps are small enough, there are few or no unwritten assumptions, and everything is in a logical order. (It wasn't until I'd been writing my own recipes for a while, and then looked at some commercial cookbooks, that I realized how badly some writers do at just putting things in order!) This makes sure that when somebody reads the piece, they get the foundational data first and then they can go through the steps and actually do what I'm describing, without having to double back too much. This is also a good time to check vocabulary -- if anything might be too obscure, it needs an inline definition or (if the piece is long enough) a glossary.