Many of WIM’s members were women moving into corporate management positions. Remember, those were the days when women earned 50 or 60 cents to a man’s dollar. Those were the days when the “girl” got coffee for the men and often ran errands for her boss, too. When executives never touched a keyboard because keyboards were only for secretaries. When computers were just beginning to replace typewriters and floppies were eight inches in diameter. (I wrote a user guide about that time in which I had to caution new owners of computers not to use magnets to stick their floppies to the fridge or push pins to stick them on the wall. Really!) When only men were considered to be supporting a family. Every woman I knew who saw the movie 9 to 5 exclaimed, “Yeah! That’s how it really is.” We all knew managers and middle managers who deserved to be harnessed and strung up just like Judy, Violet, and Doralee strung up Franklin M. Hart Jr. Like the guy who fired me from a technical writing job. He was younger than I was, had only a B.S. degree, and probably weighed less than I did. Ahhh, yes. Living well may be the best revenge, but writing about the one who done ya wrong is a pretty good revenge, too. Like there's this telemarketer in Quicksilver Moon. He's so offensive that the vampire leaves him in a gas station, pretty well drained. Hah!
WIM taught me networking skills and brought me friends that I have to this day. As a very active member, I started using those skills, nourishing those friendships. I went to meetings. I became a member of the board that planned a women’s conference (also a new phenomenon in those days). I started doing presentations to other Women-In networking groups—Women In Advertising, Women In Film, Women In Accounting, and so on. I am proud of the fact that I actually persuaded a room full of accountants to close their eyes (in public!) and go along with a brief guided visualization I was leading. (Accountants tend never to close their eyes.)As I was becoming known in the Orange County business community as a speaker, I was also exploring new avenues in my own life. One of them became my favorite topic: creativity, which I wrote about here last month. As I recall, studies in brain hemisphere function were beginning to be released to the public, and I found that extraordinarily interesting. Pretty soon, I put two topics that interested me together and created a talk for networking organization that I called “Right Brain, Left Brain, Write.”
Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and numerous scientific and medical studies, we know a fair amount today about how the brain works when we’re doing specific tasks or thinking specific thoughts. Twenty-five years ago, we knew that that left brain is in charge of words and logic, the right brain in charge of images and creativity. That’s very simplistic, of course, but it’s still useful. I often find myself pulling little bits of my old speech out of my head to help my authors organize the books they’re writing. I’ll be talking about some of those techniques for getting organized and jump-starting creativity in the blogs I write for Feathered Quill.
Put simply, therefore, what I told my audiences twenty-five years ago and what I tell the authors whose books I edit today is that it takes both sides of the brain to write successfully. We use our right brain to “brainstorm” for ideas and/or conjure up the characters. I see and hear my characters, and I think that happens in my right brain, though sometimes the characters seem to be standing right in front of me. We use our left brains to organize our ideas or the plot and to get the words right. When I’m editing, in fact, I got into what I call total left-brain-nerd mode. That’s when I’m paying attention to commas and semicolons, to details about characters, to historical accuracy. My guess is that I’m not much fun to be around when I’m in left-brain-nerd mode, but that’s what my authors pay me for. Making collages like the one I described last month is my anodyne. So is watching DVDs of movies in which people sing and dance.