This week we are posting about the most valuable business skill
that we’ve used in our writing career.
Here’s my take on it.
Terry
It may sound odd, but I wasn’t
sure what “business skill” meant. “Business” is a vague word that can take on a
lot of meanings. The word business connotes busy-ness. People “go about their
business,” and it means they are doing the things they normally do, which may be
nothing more than going to the grocery store or picking up the kids from
school. “None of your business” means don’t get involved with other people’s
lives.
In the case of writers, our “busy-ness” is focused on
writing. I looked up skills for business on the internet and found this list of Essential Skills:
· Financial management.
· Marketing, Sale, and customer service
· Communication and negotiation.
· Leadership.
· Project management and planning.
· Delegation and time management.
· Problem solving.
·
Networking.
It strikes me that the
skills that help us succeed in our writing career are basically the same skills
needed to succeed in everyday life. We have to manage our money, communicate,
negotiate (with ourselves and others), provide leadership (leading ourselves to
our desk to get to work), manage our time, solve plot problems, etc.. When we
publish, we have to learn the arcane business of marketing and sales, we have
to network, which involves not only marketing our own books, but supporting
fellow authors in their efforts.
And the same thing applies to “advanced”
skills in the list below.
· Complex
problem solving.
· Critical
thinking.
· Creativity.
· People
management.
· Coordinating
with others.
· Emotional
intelligence.
· Judgement
and decision making.
· Service orientation.
Which of these things has been most helpful
to me? None of the above. When I was in grade school, I taught myself to type.
Who knows why? It was a whim. I had seen my mother type since I was a child—she
was a fast, accurate typist whose skills were essential in the World War II
years when she worked in a munitions plant. When my father was in college when
I was a toddler, my mother typed his papers. I remember going to sleep to the
sound of the typewriter. So maybe it was admiration for her that drove me. But
whatever the reason I had for learning to type, I’m not sure I ever had a more
useful skill. I worked my way through college typing, and in college typed all
my papers. in writing it has been a key skill. I’ve always been a fast typist,
so when people say that I write fast, I sometimes think that’s because I can
type as fast as I think.
When I lost the use of my right hand for a
time a few years ago, I wondered how I was ever going to write my next book.
Turned out that if you type over 100 words per minute, typing with one hand
still gets you 50 words per minute. My fifth book was written entirely with my
left hand.
As I writer, of course I value creativity,
time management, marketing, critical thinking, networking, and all the rest. It’s
important that I have computer skills, that I am able to give talks that have
substance and humor, that I can update my website, that I can navigate the
internet for research, that I can participate in multiple social media sites.
It’s valuable to be able to delegate jobs that I can give someone else to do, like
recently hiring someone to read all my books and put together a Bible of
characters. I have to be able to make a judgement about whether an idea I have
for a story is going to be viable. When the times comes, I have to be able to
edit effectively. I have to communicate about my books, from pitching the
initial idea to my publisher to talking to readers about them.
There’s hardly a business skill that isn’t
useful, but for my money, the time I took to teach myself to type all those
years ago tops the list.
Terry Shames
A Risky Undertaking for Loretta Singletary
The Samuel Craddock Series
www.terryshames.com
