The One Thing You Need to Survive Your Writing Life
Weirdly, it's neither a book nor anything you use to actually write.
đ Today is launch day for my novel, Dear Edna Sloane! (I shared here about the process of writing it on my lunch breaks and other stolen bits of time.) Come to my launch party 4/30 in Brooklyn, or one of my other events!
â¤ď¸ Got a great love story? Take my one-day class on writing a Modern Love essay.
âď¸ If you have a writing project thatâs stuck, letâs chat! I coach writers through their blocks, edit manuscripts of all lengths, and review agent queries and book proposals. Put some time on my calendar for a free 15-minute call to discuss how we can get you unstuck.
Lately (eternally?) thereâs been a lot of talk in the writerly community about how nobody buys books anymore, or maybe they do a little bit, but publishing remains a batshit way to try to make any money, and itâs also a struggle to support oneself as a freelance writer given <waves hands at everything>, and also guess what you canât get a well-paying teaching job at a university anymore either, so like, how are writers meant to pay their rent anyway? Yâall, it is depressing. I mean, itâs not as depressing as like, war crimes. Or the fact that I forgot to sign out of Netflix at the last Airbnb I stayed in and now I have to change the password AGAIN. But still, a bummer.
Then again, one neednât focus on our shared vow of poverty to feel frustration about the writing life. Writing itself is frustrating enough! Learning the craft? Fascinating, yet difficult. Finishing a draft? Usually equal parts exultant and excruciating. Revising the draft? Same. And then! You get to shop the thing around and court rejection. And then! You get a book published and â well, you get the idea.
Now, for whatever reason, Iâm still pro-writing. When I close my computer and live my actual life, I care about books, and I care about writing, and I care about writers. So when the discourse whips me up a froth of hysteria, I get offline. I connect with my writer friends and we bitch about it all over martinis and fries at our favorite local place. Or I text my writer-friends group chat, and we send each other the dumbest gifs we can find until weâre laughing the pain away. Or I go to my local bookstore and caress hardcovers (with their consent!) and pick up books and read sentences that thrill me and sentences that bore me and sentences that make me jealous and I enjoy the happy overwhelm of wanting to read 3,000 books all at once. Or I go to a literary event and sit in bad chairs with fellow nerds and get excited when a writer says something that makes my brain tingle.
Did you notice a theme there? The key is: Community.
So much of writing happens alone in a room. And yet, other people are what will make your writing life livable. Other people are also how I get out of various writing slumps: Going on DIY writing retreats together; texting each other âWOW WRITING IS TERRIBLEâ; talking out knotty plot points over mason-jar cocktails on my terrace, whatever it is⌠with, thatâs right, writer friends. Iâve had the good luck to go on a couple residencies, which is a nice way to shake up the writer-friend-stock and hear exciting new writer gossip, but they arenât necessary. Nor is going to an MFA program, nor is living in New York City (I donât think?).
After all, you only need a handful of writer-friends to get you through. When youâre choosing to spend time, effort, money, and your last scraps of sanity on a path as strange and winding as writing, you simply need people in your life who get it. In fact, I think any writer needs a minimum of three writer-friends:
The Comrade-in-Arms. This friend should be in a similar writing-life-stage as you, which means the role might sometimes have to be filled by different people. If youâre just starting out, you need someone whoâs also just starting out. If youâve published one book and now find yourself in terrible sophomore slump, itâs going to help you to have a pal going through the same thing. Itâs like how when youâre a new parent, you need a friend whose baby is the EXACT same age as yours. You just do.
The Foil. Opposites attract in romantic relationships, as Paula Abdul and her cartoon cat boyfriend taught us in 1989, and writer-friendships are no different. If youâve always got your nose to the grindstone, you need that friend who will drag you to a weird dance party âfor the plot.â If you know you need help focusing, you need the friend who will bring their stupid tomato timer thing over and be your accountability buddy. I love beautiful literary novels that go nowhere, so itâs great for me to have a writer friend who always has great story advice and assigns me movies to watch for their structure.
The Nudge. Alright, Iâm going to get really real with yâall here, are you ready? Here is where Iâm going to say that itâs useful to have that person in your writing community who inspires you to keep at it, to keep working, to keep getting better, to push yourself. That can be a wonderful, life-giving friend. But also, honestly, it can be a rival. It can be a rival who has no idea theyâre your rival. You can even have a nemesis if you want! What matters here is that this is someone in your writing community who keeps you moving, even when it would be so much easier to quit writing altogether, to stop trying to create a whole damn world out of words and settle back in an Airbnb to watch Netflix on my account which I still havenât signed out of.
One hopes for an even more robust community of writer pals than this, but I think these are the basic needs.
So, if you donât have writer-friends, where can you find them? Go to literary events in your area. Attend a writing conference. Take a writing class (I often hear from my Sackett Street Writers Workshop students here in Brooklyn that they form writing groups after our classes and keep helping each other with their work!). Go to a weeklong writing workshop (I teach at this one and itâs pretty great!) or a weekend writing retreat (hey why not the one I co-run! God will I ever shut up?).
Sometimes this can seem counterintuitive because hey, shouldnât that time be spent writing? And what is this, consorting with the competition? Well, Iâll let you in on a little secret: this is part of writing. And whatâs more: there is no competition. Thatâs not really how writing works.
Something that helped me immensely some years back was running a reading series in my neighborhood. Suddenly, all the brilliant writers I invited to read at the events were not people I was jealous of, but people I felt proud of and connected to. So-and-so won an award? Thatâs great for the reading series and our community! Whatâs-his-face got an amazing review? Also great for us all! Because in the end, as the statistics rudely show, there are a whole lot of people who donât care about books. Donât you want to be hanging out with the ones who do? Itâs so fun to get to root for writer-friends, not to mention to get to read their books and get this peek at the insides of their weird beautiful brains! What a world!
Plus, the more writers you know, the more it normalizes the act the writing, the more paths youâll be able to imagine towards satisfying writing lives, and the more people youâll have to commiserate with. Your non-writer friends, partners, and families will breathe a sigh of relief. And your writing, Iâm willing to bet, will improve.
đ SPEAKING OF WRITING RETREATS (were we?) registration is now open for the second annual Red Clover Writing Retreat, this October in beautiful Wisconsin. Book your space now!
Uninterrupted time
Immediately recognized myself as The Nudge. For writer-friends and also in general life. Sigh.