Last Saturday I went to the New Hampshire Writer’s Project yearly writer’s conference, the largest writing conference in my area. It was a chance to hear a keynote speaker, participate in writing workshops, and learn more about marketing and promotion.
All that stuff was pretty useful, I guess (read: it was a lot of stuff I already knew), but one thing about the conference made me really, REALLY glad I went: the chance to meet people.
I wrote last week about how you present yourself as a creative person when you’re meeting people in social situations like weddings. This applies even more in professional situations, where people actually WANT to know about your creative work and expect you to present yourself as a creative professional. These situations can be even easier, I think, because in these situations, people are actively interested in learning about the work you do, since it’s potentially in the same realm as what they do.
In this post I want to talk a bit about how I’ve tackled networking and conference-type situations over the years, what I’ve learned, and where I screwed up.
Networking Seems Scary Before You Actually Do It
When I was a kid, work was work, and the very idea of networking felt like a chore that was way beyond me—something grownups did. The word itself also felt like part of a cartoonish world of Wall Street skyscrapers, ’80s-era briefcases, and tight handshakes that I definitely had no place in, like this ridiculous Kids in the Hall sketch that still makes me laugh.
As I got older, though, I began to learn how most jobs and opportunities depend on who you know, and the more people you knew and kept in touch with in a professional/career sense, the more likely one of those people was to give you a job. (This is of course a very “What’s in it for ME?” attitude, and I’ll get to why that’s not a good thing to have!)
As a result, networking began to seem important, but it also seemed like a lot of work. I considered networking to be akin to other tiresome job-hunting tasks like writing resumes or poring through Indeed ads. It seemed atrocious and difficult, so I avoided it.
Also, looking at it from Young Ian’s perspective, who would possibly want to get to know me, a twentysomething nobody?
Networking, it seemed, was dead in the water.
Networking Is Only Networking If It Feels Genuine
It wasn’t until much, much later, when I’d started working different kinds of jobs and met a lot of people through those jobs, that I started looking at networking differently. I’d meet somebody cool at work (either another employee, or someone who was passing through), have a genuinely fun and interesting conversation with them, then say hi and talk to them again the next time we met.
These genuine interactions felt a lot different than the cartoonish Wall Street-esque networking meetings I’d imagined—they just felt like, well, meeting people at work.
It wasn’t until later when I realized something else: Those people I was meeting through my work were introducing me to opportunities to do cool things.
My grad school experience, while difficult and arduous in a lot of ways, is where all this really began to hit home. When I was working for the English Department’s Prairie Schooner literary journal, I met Paul Hanson Clark, who was working as their web designer. He was a cool dude, and when I stopped by for work stuff we used to hang out in his office having interesting conversations. Some of these conversations, just tangentially, happened to be about the literary journal or web design, so they helped me learn more about these things.
Later, after Paul and I became actual friends, I started going to his SP CE writer’s group in Lincoln, Nebraska, which he’d been involved with for a long time. It was a fun group and a chance to meet other cool writers and poets in the area, and I got a lot of feedback on my own writing there during a time when I was looking for more of a genuine writing community.
Within my department, meeting other grad students also helped me learn about different opportunities. Talking to people around the English department provided a WEALTH of information about the academic writing world, and at least one job: I got hooked up with my online test-grading job because some other people in the department were working for them too, and suggested I apply.
None of these interactions felt like “networking,” per se: they felt like meeting people and talking to them in the same genuine way I’d always done. In getting to know them, though, I just happened to find out about cool opportunities along the way.
Networking as Just Plain Meeting People
I think a lot about this idea that conversations with people—whether for fun, for work, or whatever—should feel genuine, and not just based on getting something in return. If I meet someone new, I want to enjoy talking to them, share what I have to say, and see what they have to say too.
Nowadays, when I meet people (whether at a conference, or in general), I don’t think of it as “networking,” and I DEFINITELY don’t think of these conversations as ways of getting benefits for myself, either immediately, or down the line.
Instead, I just talk like a normal person, and mention my writing or the work I do if it feels natural to do so. I also want to hear what the other person is working on, because the creative or professional work that other people do is often really interesting to me. Maybe I’ll never see the person again, or maybe I will see them again and we’ll have another solid conversation. Maybe some opportunity I can’t imagine will come up as a result of these conversations, or maybe it won’t—I don’t really think about that part.
What I DEFINITELY don’t do, though, is look at these interactions as ways of selling myself, my writing, or my skills, because people can smell that shit a mile away. If the person is interested in what I do, they’ll let me know—and if I’m interested in what they do, of course I’ll let them know, either immediately, or at some point down the line, even if it’s years later.
If you take away one thing from this post, it should be this: Don’t think of the conversations you have with people in professional situations as networking, because that just adds a lot of pressure. Instead, look at them as real conversations, where you can talk about the work you both do, different skills or opportunities, and random things you both find interesting. That’ll help you stay relaxed, engaged, and take the pressure off both you.
Also, last bit of advice: get a business card!!!!! They are AWESOME for helping people remember you, and they help you give out your information easily instead of fumbling with phones and social media links. Plus, they can make you look like you really know what you’re doing ;-)