Known for her candor and unconventional approach to business, Penelope Trunk’s new book arrives in bookstores on May 25. Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success offers insight into the modern workplace, from dealing with sexual harassment or a difficult boss to striking a balance with work and outside interests. Penelope has given me helpful advice on my career and my writing, so here she offers advice to others.
Urban Muse: Since you moved recently, how did you stayed organized and focused on writing during the chaos of moving and navigating a new city?Penelope: Our move was one of the most chaotic times of my life. We had been planning to move out of New York City, but we had not planned to move when we did. It turned out that our whole building was infested with bed bugs. Getting rid of bed bugs is very, very difficult and very expensive and we would have had to live in a hotel for a month. So we left the city with no notice. We had to leave almost all our belongings because they were infested by bugs and we would have had to have a separate moving truck and storage for everything with bugs. My husband and I were totally traumatized. It was so bad that during the move, I developed a psychosomatic rash that looked like bed bugs but wasn't.
The only thing that kept me sane was that I wrote twice a day, every day, at morning and at night. It was my only routine, it was the only thing I was doing that I knew I was doing a good job with. Everything else seemed uncertain to me. I remember days, when we woke up in Madison with almost no belongings, nowhere to live, and no car to get around, and I said, "I have to spend three hours working, I can't fall behind." I am not sure if I would have fallen behind that much, but I worked to keep myself sane. I had also just started blogging a few months before we moved, and I blogged every night before I went to bed. It's during this time that I fell in love with blogging. I loved the routine and the connection I felt to the world, no matter where I was.
UM: You mentioned how different blog-writing and book-writing are. How did you make the switch?P: I thought that writing a book would mean putting a bunch of columns in a pile and binding them. But when I did that, my publisher rejected the manuscript. After many months of hubris, I agreed to take direction from my editor and write a book the way she wanted it written. I learned so much about thinking in big ideas instead of column-length ideas. I know a lot of people say their editor did nothing for them. My editor taught me how to connect smaller ideas into bigger ideas. She also told me to be useful. All the stuff where I am telling stories but not being that useful she cut out. The impact of this is that when I wrote about the bed bugs, above, I went back and asked myself if I am giving people something useful in that story or just blabbing about bugs. Frankly, it's questionable. So it's good my editor isn't reading.
UM: If a writer decides that perhaps full-time freelancing isn't for them, how is the career outlook for re-entering the 9-5 world?P: The 9-5 world has a big need for writers. So as long as you have some good clips, it seems reasonable to go back to office life. Most businesses are struggling to figure out how to get noticed more among their demographic. A writer who has been pitching stories to editors has a good sense of how to get someone's story noticed.
In terms of writing, I am trained to write fiction, not marketing copy. But I realized quickly that if I want to work in corporate America, I need to learn how to write copy that sells things. A lot of being employable is making the mental shift to sales.
UM: Some of the comments in response to your Yahoo! Finance columns are very critical. How did you develop a thick skin for dealing with naysayers?P: I have been getting disgruntled comments for years, from my column. In general, it's important to read the comments to know what people think -- to learn more about the topic, so I write better next time. Also, a lot of times I respond to very angry comments in a nice, conversational appreciative way, and then the person writes back very cordially.
That said, I think that many of the comments on Yahoo are not so much critical as mysongenist. Each week a few people write about whether it would be good to have sex with me. A man would never receive this type of comment on Yahoo. The same thing happened on TechCrunch, where the one woman who was writing for them had to deal with misogynist comments and she quit. It's a significant problem online and I don't think people talk about it enough. We shouldn't have to have Kathy Sierra getting death threats in order to have the conversation about this.
UM: And for the curveball... since you write about business, what is the most unusual job you've had?P: I worked on a French chicken farm. I have an extensive farm vocabulary in french that is totally useless in my life. The family thought I was nuts, and I thought farm life was nuts, but I had no money and they had no farm help, so we needed each other. It was a very bad situation, punctuated by terribleness like the six-year-old saying rude things about me because she thought I didn't understand, and the fifteen-year-old telling me he was gay when the family, I am sure, did not even know the word for it -- in French or English. That said, I learned a lot about what I want in a job, why interpersonal skills matter the most, and why any job is a learning experience, no matter how absurd it is.Thanks, Penelope. Good luck with the book!