During my recent sojourn to Los Angeles, I filled up a lot of my schedule with in-person meetings with several folks with whom I’ve only interacted via social media or the telephone.

To those I’d contacted but we couldn’t make happen – maybe next time.

But back to the matter at hand. Every one of those meetings generated some thorough conversations about working within, or at least working on breaking into, the industry. Some were more experienced than others, but everybody had a lot of interesting things to contribute.

Plus, they were all well aware of my goal/ambition to be a working writer, so suggestions and advice were plentiful and happily offered, and I was more than happy to receive them.

And that’s also where things got…interesting. As you’d expect, there was a wide variety of information offered. One person would suggest something, another would suggest something different, and more than once did these two suggestions totally contradict another.

Someone says “THIS is what you need to do,” while another says “Whatever you do, DON’T do THIS.”

What’s an aspiring creative-type person to do?

One of my meetings was with a semi-retired industry veteran. I’d received some advice the day before, and was a bit hesitant, or maybe call it skeptical, to accept it. Seeing as how the person I was meeting with was pretty savvy, I asked what they thought about it. They had that “Huh?” look. “I’ve never heard of that before,” was their response, followed by some rational explaining why they respectfully disagreed.

It’s been my experience that everybody has an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work, but that’s also based on how it applied to them. Circumstances and conditions will always be different in every situation for each individual. What worked for somebody else may totally backfire for you. Figure out what you think works best for you.

And be forewarned – sometimes you might choose wrong. It happens to everybody. Use it a learning opportunity to help ensure it doesn’t happen again. In theory, you’ll only make that kind of mistake once.

I was very fortunate to be able to meet with so many knowledgeable people, which now enables me to more or less cherry-pick from the suggestions and advice I think are the most appropriate and applicable.

Hopefully, they’ll yield the desired results. I’ll let you know how it goes.