Author Kenneth Jedding knows it’s overwhelming, exhausting and frustrating for post-collegians when they embark on their initial search for a job. So many factors make up a career and even more goes into the obtaining of one. Post-college, most graduates don’t have a “set in stone” roadmap of how they will take the next steps into “adulthood.” Jedding’s book isn’t about helping you find yourself, but rather how you can create, market and land the job that you’ve been looking for.
His book, Higher Education: On Life, Landing a Job, and Everything Else They Didn't Teach You in College, is the guide that should go hand in hand with the diploma. There is no magic wand to wave and bring you your dream job, but Jedding supplies the path to follow, the questions to ask and answers to seek that can help you make it happen.
PC: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
KJ: A writer, with an overlay of what my father thought I should do, which was business. For a long time I believed that the occupation I had little talent for (i.e., commercial banking) was a legitimate one, while the occupation I had more talent for (i.e., writing), was a fraudulent one. So I was living upside-down for a while. It’s hard to eat that way.
PC: What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of good writing?
KJ: Having something to say and saying it beautifully.
I also like the writing lesson in A River Runs Through It. The aspiring journalist’s father, a minister, read his son’s essay and asks him to rewrite it to be half as long, then to do it again. I’m always asking myself about a piece: “Can I say this more succinctly?” Of course, this rule of thumb doesn’t necessarily apply to fiction, or s/he among you who is the reincarnation of Marcel Proust.
PC: Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?
KJ: My books are all message. Dr. Seuss’ Oh The Places You’ll Go is the most popular gift for college grads. When twenty-somethings want to figure out their lives, we offer them, well, green eggs and ham, or the equivalent. My books actually help people get along with their parents, navigate their relationships, and make decisions about their careers that can effect real change in their lives.
PC: What do you see as the influences on your writing?
KJ: Everything I’ve ever read. And: every time I bump into a figurative wall. Real walls, too.
PC: What were your feelings when you first saw the cover of the finished product?
KJ: “Wow. I did that?”
With the first one, I kept opening it and reading it to make sure it really existed and wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. You gotta be sure about such things.
PC: What dreams have been realized as a result of your writing? Where do you hope to take your writing in the future?
KJ: Helping others, is the answer to the first question. I can’t answer the second one yet because I don’t know.
PC: Can you take us through the steps for one of your books getting published?
KJ: I self-published the first one. I went all over the country speaking at colleges and conferences and even got myself on TV, all in service of my mentoring mission. Years later, an agent read my book, and told me that it needed to be published by a “real house.” I was flattered—even if I felt I’d made the self-published book “real.” By then I had also begun to think that a new, updated and expanded book was needed rather than the old one. But I didn’t want to break the momentum so I kept all of this to myself.
The agent took the idea of publishing the first book to a major publishing house, where an editor said she loved it. She wanted to publish it and requested a meeting with me. She even sent me affectionate emails referencing passages from the book. I went to the meeting, she asked me for my marketing plan, and I said I didn’t have one. The next day she told the agent that the deal was off.
Ouch.
I was really hurt. She’d led me to believe we had a deal and reneged, as if on a whim. I fired my agent. A few days later I was getting my hair cut and, feeling sorry for myself, told my barber the story. “Can you believe my agent sent me in there without a marketing plan?!” And Lionel said, “Well, why don’t you come up with a marketing plan?”
Oh.
So I did. Then I found a new agent, wrote a proposal for a new book, the one I really wanted, and submitted it (along with a marketing plan) to Rodale. It all worked out.
Here’s the thing: without the so-called horrible event making me aware that I needed a marketing plan, this book wouldn’t exist. Rodale wouldn’t have considered the proposal.
This logic applies generally, as well. For example: if it weren’t for a girlfriend (or two) who drove me crazy in my twenties, and with whom the breakups, however painful, taught me about relationships, I never would have recognized and married my wife years later.
Life’s interesting.
PC: Do you hear from your readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
KJ: I do. I put comments from readers, anonymously but with permission, on my webpage: http://www.higheredgradbook.com/kjedding-praise.htm
PC: What are you reading now?
KJ: Autobiography of a Yogi.
PC: If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in any of your books?
KJ: No. So far, so good.
PC: What advice would you share for aspiring writers?
KJ: Feedback’s your friend. We all want people to tell us that what we wrote is perfect, but that’s not how we learn. Develop a thick skin and, in the process, you’ll begin to discern which feedback is valuable and which isn’t.
For more on Kenneth Jedding visit: http://www.higheredgradbook.com/
*Image via authors website
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