In this week's seminar, the group brought in guest speakers who were mainly involved in the writing aspect of media. This was because this week's focus was on people who sought a career in Journalism as well as anyone who wanted to become an accomplished writer. They gave many interesting insights as to how to let your voice be heard. I gave this seminar a HD. I will explain why below.
Guest speakers:
This week's guests were excellent! They were extremely relevant to this week's seminar as Catherine, Jo and Paul had heaps of experience under their belt and the way they shared their thoughts to the audience was nothing short of entertaining and enthusiastic. Tom's talks on how he had to shamelessly promote himself was impressive and I found that it might be a good way to promote yourself when you are just starting out in the industry and need to get recognised because no one knows about you. I love how the guests spoke plainly, using vulgarities every now and then, like how Catherine stresses the importance of stuff like Twitter. The way they shared their stories with us was frank and they shared that what we needed to do to get heard, is simply to do lots of stuff, this mainly meant working for free.
Facilitation of session:
The host did a relatively good job and led the discussion quite smoothly. However, he did not seem confident to be on stage and that was quite obvious as he stuttered a little at times. Another point to note was that although there were microphones for the guests, it did not seem to capture their voices and it seemed like they were projecting their voices instead of using the mics to speak. One thing the host did well was to give both the audience and the speakers breathing space in between questions and this helped the audience to relax after some intensive sharing from the guests.
Throughout the seminar, Catherine seemed to be the dominant speaker and thus the others did not get much of a chance to speak more. This is a similar scenario as for the one last week, where Dwayne did most of the talking. I guess this is inevitable as some people are naturally more outspoken as compared to others. This is one area where the host could have helped facilitate better.
Relevance to my areas of interest:
As I write poems every now and then, I was interested in how these people really put in loads of effort to get their careers up and running. The one thing that really struck me about this seminar was how all the guests have their own approach to life and their views on how to make things work.
My favourite analogy of how to get people to notice your work came from Jo Walker. The way she says to treat the editors of magazines or newspapers like 'monkeys behind a typewriter with ADHD', how you have to not just give them a banana but 'mesh it up and play the aeroplane game and put it in their mouth'. This meant having a good knowledge of publications that you pitch to, short pitches to not put them off reading long lines of stuff, and having done all the work for them.
As Jo says, editors are 'not humans, but primates with short attention spans, very little time to spare and a hugely overflowing email inbox'. This really gave me a clear insight as to how I should grab the attention of editors should I ever decide to become a journalist or a writer.
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