On Mixing Writing and Friends
[image description: stacks of books have been arranged to make a window. Through the window, a man and woman are standing on the other side smiling at one another.]
Some of the most meaningful friendships in my life have been as a result of writing. When you spend as much time reading, writing, and thinking about reading and writing when you’re not physically doing either, as I do, it makes sense that you’d want to surround yourself with people who find value in these things you care so deeply about.
My writing community has changed over the years. Until college, I didn’t have a writing community and I think my work suffered or at least didn’t progress as quickly as I’d have liked, because I didn’t have a reliable source of community or feedback. In college, I took creative writing classes and the students in those classes were my writing community, at least for a semester, until I found my friend Abbey who became my writing partner outside of class. After college, I joined See Jane Write, a community of women writers in my hometown. That group is actually what inspired me to start this blog and why it’s still around 6 years later.
When I moved to Columbus, the first thing I did is seek out a writing community. I struck out a few times before I struck gold. I visited about a dozen writers groups on Meetup and organized by various local libraries before I met enough writers I connected with in town. Eventually, I found a group of women who write nonfiction and it felt like I’d found my people.
I have great respect for the value communities of artists, including writers, provide. I don’t know any good writer who hasn’t benefited from a community behind them. Which makes you wonder why writers have such a reputation for being recluses.
I think I know.
A couple of years ago, it was late December and me and one of my friends were off work. We decided to get a head start on our New Years Resolutions by spending the day writing together. The goal was just to stay focused all day writing. At the time, I’d recently gotten an idea for a YA novel and was excited to work on it since I’d spent so much of the previous year writing creative nonfiction essays that required a lot of dredging up emotional muck in order to make good. I just wanted to write something fun and fluffy to cleanse my palate. And, who knows? It might have been good.
He asked me what I was working on and I told him, explaining that I’d gotten the idea less than 2 weeks ago and didn’t have a lot figured out. He proceeded to grill me with questions and my answer to a lot of them was, “I don’t know. That’s a good question and I’ll have to take that into consideration as I continue to work on this.” He then explained to me why the premise would never work. While some writers meticulously outline beforehand, I prefer to figure things out as I go and edit later. I prefer to write while the urge to write burns, so to be put down when I’d hardly put words on the page was demoralizing.
I remember sitting there thinking, “I just want to go home. Why did I tell him my idea when I could’ve just said, ‘It’s not ready to be shared yet’? Why did I open myself up for criticism before I’d even had a first draft ready?” I felt like I’d walked into a room with an alligator and offered my hand to its mouth.
When I got home that afternoon I decided I was going to be more careful about who I talked about my writing with. If you want to criticize a finished product, fine, but don’t tear something apart that you haven’t seen yet and that still has a lot of work left to do.
This only got worse when, over the next couple of weeks, every time I opened the draft on my laptop to write, I heard his voice in my ear telling me it’d never work. Years later, I’m only just now feeling able to shut his voice out and just write.
More recently, I was ranting to a trusted writer friend about how frustrating it is that most literary magazines don’t pay writers for their work. (If this shocks you, stay tuned. I could write a whole book on how exploitative this industry is.) I think everyone should be paid for their labor, whether you’re a computer programmer or an artist because work is work and creative labor isn’t less than other forms of work.
My friend argued that getting paid is nice, but publications can offer other benefits in lieu of money, such as educational opportunities through workshopping a piece, helping new writers build their resumes by getting their first byline, connecting with other writers, having their work promoted, providing a platform for marginalized voices, etc. As the conversation went on, she mentioned that creative nonfiction essays should be paid because of the emotional toll they take on the writer, but genres like humor don’t take as much out of you, thus it’s okay not to pay those writers as long as xyz magazine is offering other incentives for publishing with them.
I spent some time considering this argument and it doesn’t sit right with me. I write in a couple of different genres and I don’t want to imagine someone doing some mental calculation as we’re discussing my writing and deciding which of my pieces are worthy of pay. To me, my sci-fi short stories are just as worthy as my essays; my poems are just as valuable as my cultural criticism. All of them, upon publication by a third party magazine, deserve payment in legal US tender.
All of this is making me cautious about whom I talk to about my work. Prior to these two events, I was comfortable talking shop with these friends and now I’m second-guessing. I realized that whatever weight you give to someone in your friendship and the value you attribute to their positive feedback is the same amount of weight and value you can expect from their negative feedback. The more highly you think of a person, the harder it is to write off their opinion, even when you disagree. The more highly you think of a person, the easier it is for their dismissal of your work to crush you.
Maybe the answer is to just write until you’re ready to pay an editor to give you feedback. Maybe the answer is to only talk about writing with people who are more professional acquaintances than friends. I don’t know; I’m still trying to figure this out for myself.
I don’t have the answers on the best way to mix writing and friends, though at the moment, I’m feeling like I should err on the side of not at all.
