When I phrase it like that, it seems like something that should come standard in the toolkit for Being A Person (along with How To Breathe and How Not To Spill Water On Yourself While Drinking*). But it’s hard! People are scary, unknown entities. But the fact of the matter is than unless you’re resigning yourself to an unfashionably ascetic lifestyle, you are going to have to talk to people. This is the dread networking that no one wants to think about and everyone has to do.

But it is not that bad! A few strategies and you’re set. Let me, a newly-minted extrovert, give you all the hot tips. Listen up!

• Find a place. Every night, in every city, people are hanging out somewhere. Go on Reddit. Go on Twitter. Read email list hosts. Grab your city’s alt-weekly. Pick something appealing, pull on your bootstraps and go. Take a friend if you’re nervous.
• Actually talk. That means stop checking your phone, nursing your drink, hanging back in the corner. Be bold, take the plunge. Stuck for an opener? Try “Hi.” And tack on a question: “Who are you?” “What do you do?” “Why won’t that waiter give me more than one mini-quiche?” etc.
• Use a name tag. Well, if appropriate for the situation. Read people’s names off their chests and call them by it. Indicate your own. Try not to stare at boobs.
• Prepare some log lines. You can probably anticipate the kind of questions you’ll get asked (see above), so get your pithy responses ready ahead of time so you don’t have to flail verbally. And be aspirational! I say something like “I’m a writer and journalist who hosts my own podcast” because, well, I am and do. Bring up your student status later (if applicable) and watch people be impressed at your initiative. Get elevator pitches in shape for your novel/screenplay/fusion restaurant concept and then impress.
• Plant seeds. This is Actual Advice I think I got from “How To Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls” (which does exist, ahem). When you first arrive somewhere, do the proverbial making-of-the-rounds, visit each cluster of people, and give them a little remark to come back to later, like “Bourbon, straight up? Excellent choice” or “I love your TARDIS necklace!” or “Where did you guys get all those mini-quiches?!” Then, if you come back to talk to them later, you can riff on what you first said. It’s a conversational callback! People like those.
• Dutch courage. I never said I was a role model! But seriously, there is a reason that cocktail parties are the locus of so many socializing events. A sufficient amount of judiciously-applied booze makes talking easier. Don’t fight science (and don’t go overboard, for God’s sake. Eat a snack beforehand!)
• Ask more questions. People like talking about themselves and what they like doing (a-duh). So ask, nod, listen, ask more. Jump in if you’ve got something really cool to say, but the secret to good conversation is that you don’t do all the work.
• Promote. If you’ve got a project (like a blog! like a podcast!) and you’re talking to the kind of people who might dig it, by all means TELL THEM. If they don’t want to read/listen, they can ignore you, but if you never tell them in the first place, they will not know about it. I like to say things like “I’ve just started a podcast and I’d love to hear what you think about it,” because 1. flattery of their opinion! and 2. if they do end up listening, they’ll do it with an engaged and critical ear, which is a win-win.
• Corollary to the above: business cards. I don’t care if you think it’s dumb. It’s the easiest way to get your information to someone. Get fancy pretty ones if you like or just buy the freebies from Vistaprint. Name, email, twitter, website, and a joke for good measure. Boom. And then give them to people. Exhort them to stay in touch.
• Believe in yourself, ’cause that’s the place to start. And I say hey! But seriously. You’ve gotta muster some self-confidence one way or another because if you, as the person who spends the most time around you, do not think you are interesting and have something to say, you’re going to have a hell of a time convincing anyone else.

*Which, okay, not all of us have mastered
**I know you’re out there! I can hear you breathing on Google Analytics!!

Recently, I have gotten three different, good chunks of writerly advice, and I’m going to attempt stringing them together on a common thread.

A while ago, I emailed Kate of Eat the Damn Cake for some wisdom from a real-life, freelance-writing, blogger-type. She was wonderfully friendly, and gave me excellent guidance, including this, paraphrasedly: “Your blog needs to be about something, and, at first at least, that thing cannot be you, because people will not want to read about you.”

Good advice–so good, in fact, that I couldn’t make myself follow it. I like writing about myself! I can’t help it. I’m 22 and the tiniest bit narcissistic and I love to riff on the absurdities I experience firsthand in my day-to-day life (because there are so many?). But though I say that this is a blog about living while writing and vice versa, and it is, I guess, that can really mean anything in practice.

Now, please read this article on Boing Boing. The advice is all so, so good: timely, relevant, practical. Especially this:

You’re only as interesting as the things you do, find or say. Even if you’re a fantastically gifted writer, if you make your work solely about you, you won’t just bore your readers: you’ll eventually get bored of yourself and give up.

It’s true! You, me, the creative types and writers especially, need to do. Make. Not just describe or transcribe or subscribe, not only render and wrangle but literally create some things that we can write about. Do you forget, like I do, that the word creative doesn’t just mean eccentric or caffeine-addicted or good at painting but describes something transitive, the action that comes from create?

Well. The last surprise of the week was when I got an email letting me know I was one of 30 kids nominated to speak at commencement. I was floored. And thrilled. And terrified. And definitely in need of advice. I could write about so many things! Be funny? Tell a story? Talk about the future? I found some guidance, no-nonsense and useful, from a speaker last year, and it’s totally shifted the paradigm in how I look at writing.

“Do not start by saying my speech is about,” she told me. “Your speech can be about anything. What do you want your speech to do?”

Pow. Writing that does things. I had never thought of it that way. But so much of my writing, of anyone’s writing, is supposed to do: my newspaper reviews tell you if concerts sucked or not, my BA paper convinces you that the medieval author of the Roman d’Enéas was trying to educate his audience in courtly love, my culture articles show you why the things we like to read or see or listen to matter, even the shitty ones. This is the ultimate goal of nonfiction writing, isn’t it? Acting on the reader.

Ergo, this blog needs a job (kind of like its author! ha ha ha). So: I want this writing to inspire you to make things. I want to make you care about the details and dig into the nitty-gritty and grind it yourself, pickle your own, get the hell outta Dodge. And then write about it. Send postcards. Get all those wonderful verbs into the first-person past tense and then keep on keepin’ on. I’ll lead by example, fingers crossed, and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

And the subject of my putative speech? I don’t know yet. Little ideas are knocking around my brain like rocks in a tumbler. But I hope it makes you think. I hope it makes you grateful. I hope I spit out a gem.