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10 Important Things You Need To Know About Finding A Mentor
Marisa Wikramanayake talks about the ten most important things you need to know before finding or getting a mentor and how not to mess it up.
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How I am planning for the next financial year as a freelancer – despite Covid-19
This may seem strange to you. In a world that increasingly seems to offer little prospects for freelancers, why would I plan for 2020-2021? Or at least plan to continue freelancing? Reasons it’s hard on Australian freelancers: Closures & shutdowns of sections, papers and magazines and budget cutbacks leave freelancers with very few places to pitch to. The knock on effect of restrictions and budget cuts and shutdowns means no work for other businesses that would hire freelancers for other work. More and more in-house journalists becoming redundant means a larger community of freelancers. There is a disparity in who amongst freelancers are eligible for government support thanks to the…
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Mentoring Cher Tan via Writers Victoria
I am now a mentor with Writers Victoria. It is pretty cool. Let me explain. I am trying to become a mentor on the IPEd/CSE mentoring program which caters to just editors but at the moment, I am also now a mentor for Writers Victoria. Writers Victoria is a writing centre for the state of Victoria in Australia. They hold events, run workshops and so on but one of the services they offer is mentoring. The Writers Victoria mentoring scheme operates like this: you apply for mentoring and Writers Victoria assess your application. You also nominate someone you want to mentor you from the list of mentors on their website.…
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Mentoring writers as an editor and writer
This blog post is intended to be a summary and cheat sheet on my part of the mentoring panel on 15 Sept 2017 at the IPEd 2017 Conference in Brisbane. Proceedings will be published online by the conference organisers so you can always check those out for more information but here are my tips, tricks and my experiences of mentoring writers as opposed to mentoring editors. First, a definition of mentoring and what I mean by it: I don’t mean actively editing a writer’s work but more reading it and discussing how they go about developing the story, how they go through the process and if it’s a business/practice related…
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IPEd Conference 2017 is next week and guess who is going?
Yay! I am off to the IPEd conference! And then of course you would ask “Yeah, ok Mari, what does IPEd stand for?” IPED: Institute of Professional Editors. Professional society of editors working either in-house or freelance throughout Australia. Basically, once every two years, somewhere in a state capital, the IPEd conference is set up and run by the local branch of IPEd. In 2013, it was our turn in Perth and yours truly was the IPEd Conference convenor. Yes. There is a video on the about me page. Go watch it. We were cool. In 2015, the IPEd Conference was in Canberra but I could not go. I was…
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My year in writing: 2016 and the freelance writer life
Marisa Wikramanayake writes about what 2016 has been like for her as a freelance writer, editor and journalist and what it meant for her career.
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Mentoring: the why and the how of doing it
If you were to ask me if I was a mentor, my immediate answer would be “No.” “No. I’m not.” But I’d have to correct myself. It’s not quite true. I’m not set up as a mentor with a mentoring program. I don’t have regular meetings with a mentee of any sort. But yes I do end up mentoring people or being in a mentor like position quite often, very unofficially. And that’s because I believe that it is important. 1) I learn a lot from having to help or train or teach or supervise someone in their work. What I usually end up doing is having to really think…
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Mentoring
At a Society of Editors (WA) meeting tonight, I was asked to be a mentor by an enthusiastic wannabe editor. I was both amused and flattered. She made a distinction between advice and ongoing support – someone who would show her the ropes and keep her from freaking out too much along the way. You have to admire her enthusiasm and the fact that she stepped forward and asked. It got me thinking. When I first started I desperately wanted a mentor too. I didn’t get one. These days, I blog about what I know and as I said to someone this week, I am happy to meet up one…
