Recently, I came across this quote from
Judy Reeves' book
Writing Alone, Writing Together:
“For all the ideas of writer as solitary, tortured soul alone in her cramped garret or shambled studio working into the night, in reality writers, like the rest of humanity, are basically communal creatures. We search out our own kind and build community as naturally as we breathe. It is within community we connect with others and, through our connecting, find home.”
When I first started writing full time, I had this idea in my head that there would be some sort of writing community that I would want to get involved in. I looked around online, subscribed to various subreddits, went to a couple meetings for local writing groups, and made a real effort to interact with other writers that I felt were on par with me in terms of notoriety and skill. I don't really know what I was looking to get out of all these social interactions. Maybe I was just curious to see how other "real" writers did it. Maybe this was my half-ass attempt at marketing. But whatever the case, it very quickly became painfully clear that other writers are annoying as shit and I couldn't stand them.
What I found when I probed various writing groups is that the people in these groups are, for the most part, not there to be productive writers. The people in these groups were there to complain, to whine, to get attention, sometimes to troll. I think I expected to find a group of writers that wrote prolifically and published often who would egg each other on and post maybe infrequent updates about their work but mostly keep focused on completing their next project.
Maybe this speaks more to my own personality more than any short comings in other people. I'm a person that is very results oriented. When I would read post after post of writers who had spent multiple years working and reworking a 60k work manuscript, I just wanted to scream PUBLISH THE FUCKING BOOK. When I would read guys bragging about their 400k+ word fan-fiction that was only just getting started I could only shake my head. PUBLISH THE FUCKING BOOK. Ugh, and then there are the writers obsessed with "honing their craft" who seem to get off on the anxiety and self-flagellation of submitting work to be "critiqued" by anonymous people on the internet. JUST PUBLISH THE FUCKING BOOK.
Writing is NOT a communal effort. Writing is art created by one person (or maybe more if that's the sort of thing you're writing). What you write is your own vision. Having someone else critique or mold that vision so that it fits their own vision is stupid. It seems to me that writing is the only art form where the artist willingly submits their work to be changed by someone else. I don't get it. Obviously, you should have your writing proofed for spelling and grammar mistakes. But in my opinion, that's as far as it should go. Write your work, have it proofed, get it published. Don't let someone else piss in your soup.
Writing is NOT a communal activity. If you're chatting, tweeting, hanging out, whatever, then you aren't writing. To write, you necessarily have to be alone with your own mind. You have to sit in front of your machine and pound out each letter one at a time without the help or input of anyone else. There's only room for two hands on a keyboard. The trope of the solitary writer is a true reflection of the realities of being a productive writer and anyone that has written anything will know that this is true.
Anyway, there's my two cents on the whole writing community thing. I'll admit, I still feel like I should be involved in some way with a community that revolves around writing. I think it would be fun to hang out with other writers and have deep intellectual conversations over whatever we're writing. But then I think about the mountain of writing work I have in front of me and realize that I'd rather spend my time being a productive writer than chit chatting with other people that are not.
