How I Learned to Be Social Despite Having Introverted Parents

The other day I wrote about How Being Social Helps Me as a Writer and an Editor, and now here's my post about how I learned how to do that.

My parents are both very nice people, and they are thoroughly introverted. Their home is their restful place away from other people. They don't get the notion to invite friends over. It's just not their thing, and that's okay.

Anyone looking at me when I was a child, if they were inclined to think about introverts and extraverts, would surely have thought I'd turn out to be an introvert. I was shy and quiet. I liked to read. I played by myself, and didn't really understand other kids. I didn't smile much, and when I did it was with my lips closed. I was SERIOUS.

Anyone who saw me then and saw me now, with a gap in between, would think that the child they'd seen had been replaced by someone else. Anyone who knows me now would be SHOCKED at the quiet mini-me, if they could see her. I'm just so different. So what happened?

We moved from a small town to the suburb of a big city just a couple of weeks after I turned twelve, when I was in the middle of sixth grade. The move was a big change, and I was suddenly around a whole new set of kids who had no expectations about what I was like. I didn't transform all at once, but I was trying new things simply by having to meet new people and make new friends if I wanted any, and then over the next few years I was increasingly interested in boys, too. I had the inclination to be extraverted, but it took me a while to develop some of my social skills because I needed to be around more people to learn them. It worked well for me to learn the ways of introverts when I was younger, fitting in with my family, but as a teenager I found that I wanted to expand outward and understand how to interact with people better.

Then I went too far with that and became clingy and needy, which made people push me away. That was upsetting, so I turned to self-help books.

The best one, strangely, was called Intimate Connections, by David D. Burns, M.D. I say "strangely" because the premise of this book is that in order to develop good friendships and find love, you need to learn how to really enjoy being alone. How to treat yourself as well as someone you would date. So I was learning how to be social by learning how to be alone. It's odd that a person growing up with introverted parents would need to learn that being alone is good, given examples of people who craved alone time, but I did. This was a life-changing book for me at a time when I really needed it.

What I learned was that there's a reason for this phenomenon most people know about: when you're single and looking for someone to date, or you're lonely and looking for friends, it's often hard to find them because you have a needy vibe. People sense that you want them to fix your life, and this is off-putting. When you stop looking and start to enjoy being single and don't even want to date, instantly you meet people who want to date you. It's because you're happy with your life, and happiness is attractive. Therefore, depending on a relationship to make you happy, or friends to make you happy, will limit your ability to have relationships and friendships. It's important to find your own happiness. The trick is to like yourself.

Everything I've learned about being social since then has been layered on top of that principle. It's not about being selfish or putting myself first; it's about treating myself well, and maintaining my own stability so that I can give affection to others, and listen, and be helpful whenever possible. This means knowing my own limits so that I can say "no" when I need to. I can't help everyone all the time. I have to do my own stuff. But if I have some time and there's something I can give freely and without resentment, I give it.

Coming soon: Why Enjoying Solitude Helps Me Meet Conventions Full of People

Also coming soon: How to Say No When You Need To

How Being Social Helps Me as a Writer and Editor

Okay, first: TO BE A WRITER, ONE MUST WRITE.

To which I will add: TO IMPROVE AS A WRITER, ONE MUST LEARN AND PRACTICE.

However! There's a social element that has been helping to get my work published, and it's gotten me a job as an anthology editor, and I'm going to talk about that.

In a widely used and respected personality test (free to take here), I come out as an ENFJ (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging), which clearly affects the way that I work. I'm not even the biggest extravert in the world, especially not relative to the general pool of Americans, but relative to groups of mostly-introverted writers, I end up looking super-social. This explains the number of people I'm connected with on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I just love 'em. Bring on the people!

This might seem a little frivolous, but consider what it's brought me:

I was invited to submit a story for an anthology, when I had never been published before, on the basis of a five-minute conversation that wasn't even about writing, because I introduced myself to an author on a convention panel and complimented the awesome title of his book, and gave him my card. He put me on an invitation list. I wrote and submitted a story, and it became my first published story.

I was asked to write a book review for a magazine, which was later published in that magazine, because I spent four hours working at a convention party (and I also received an awesome t-shirt for that).

I became a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine partially because of a recommendation from an editor I had met at a convention, and the slush reading experience improved me as a writer and also gave me the experience to become a short-story editor.

I have evaluated a novel manuscript for an agent I know in the UK, because of work that I did for him on a book he was writing when I met him, which was before he even became an agent.

I was asked to contribute an interview for Writers Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy during a ten-minute conversation at a convention, which led me to interview my favorite author, Tim Powers (who, by the way, I had already met at a convention).

I've been invited to submit stories for six other anthologies as a result of meeting editors and a publisher at conventions, and three of those were accepted for the books. One of the ones that wasn't accepted for its anthology went on to make me a semi-finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. I would not have written any of these stories, or my first published one, without the guidelines given to me for the anthologies.

Knowing that publisher I met made it easy to apply knowledge gained from an editor I had met, and turn my anthology proposal into a real project. All of the authors who have submitted stories for What Fates Impose are people I've met, or I've interacted with online, or have been recommended to me by people I've met.

Okay? So in every case listed above, I actually did the work. I wrote the stories and the review, set up and conducted the interview, read the slush, and volunteered my time and effort to help people in a variety of ways. But none of those opportunities would have been there for me if I hadn't shown up at conventions, introduced myself to people, genuinely liked those people, and continued to pay attention to what they were doing online even when I couldn't see them in person. I was doing these things before anything of mine was published, and I'll continue to do them because I would definitely do the same things just for fun, even if I didn't expect to get anything else back from it at all. But the honest truth is that I have the start of a career because of being friendly and interested in people.

Coming soon: How I Learned to Be Social Despite Having Introverted Parents