I begin my day emailing a good friend who also writes. I chat with my friend Shawn at work. On walks at night, I chat with my wife.
From the time I wake up, to the time I go to sleep, I have the opportunity to talk about writing.
That Contact Helps
When I’m more active with The Juggling Writer…when I chat about writing and concerns about creative things with others, I often produce my best work.
I rarely talk about the act of writing, because I feel confident that I have that part handled. But talking about promotion and plans and getting support and feedback…that’s invaluable to me. Because of that interaction, it makes holing up totally isolated from it all and producing much easier.
As much as I may like to think I do it all on my own, I don’t. I owe a lot to the people who listen to me. While I’d still be a writer, I wouldn’t be the writer I am without them.
So it’s no surprise that I liked this entry on The 99 Percent blog about the social networks of creators long gone.
Maybe you will, too.
Thanks!
I also love the conversations in the comments, here; they often help just as much as any conversation with people I see or hear from every day. So thanks to all who take the time to toss their thoughts into the mix — I really appreciate it!
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Oh, and this is called “The Company of Other Writers (Part 2). For those who missed it, here’s part 1.
I would be horribly alone and devastated if I didn’t have my costuming and seamstress friends to chat with! They sometimes give me tips, encouragement, and just listen to my frustrations. Other times, it’s nice to be able to celebrate the things we’ve all worked so hard on and have fun being ourselves in pretty clothes!
Well, I do like to talk…
Not sure what to think. Are people more creative because they have more social interaction, or do they need more social interaction because they have become more creative? My original premise was the former, but after reading the link you provided, I wonder if the latter is more correct.
Cynthia: Yes, the little celebrations are nice when you have that kind of friendship. Completing a novel…it’s like you expect to type THE END and have balloons fall from the sky and sirens going off, but in a weird way, it’s this lonely moment. You’re done. You have no big project for the moment. So…it’s those people in your life who congratulate you and all the follows that remind you that you made something meant to be seen.
Paul: I agree that it’s the latter. I always kind of envied those who had a large circle of friends and were much more social than me, but having that interaction didn’t make them creative. It gave them skills that can help in life, but some of the most social people I know aren’t particularly creative…at least in the sense of creating something from nothing.
Juggling and writing were things I started in solitude. I taught myself how to juggle along, and the first notebooks I filled at roughly the same time I started juggling were done in secrecy. Nobody knew I was writing, and unless you peeked into my backyard, nobody knew I juggled.
It wasn’t until they were things that stuck that I sought out like-minded people, Once I found local juggling groups, my skills increased dramatically; I had people to chat with who understood this thing I loved. Juggling was the common bond that kicked off some of my best friendships that exist all these years later.
I’ve only taken one writing class, fairly early on when I started taking it seriously, and it was finding friends in the class that in ways was better than the things I learned in the class. With the exception of a few close writing friends, I never really chatted about the mechanics of writing, but it was always nice to say something about being a writer and have another person say, “You, too!” and know you weren’t so alone.
Just being around others and seeing them working rubs off. Whether it was an artist friend or a writer friend, seeing them finish things made me want to finish things even more. And once I realized people liked what I was doing, I wanted that feeling of finishing again.
The main reason I started The Juggling Writer was I drifted away from some of my creative friends. I put more into my day job than into what I love doing for the first time ever and felt hollow. I thought more about editing airplane manuals than writing stories. (I was in aviation technical publications.) While I liked the company of pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants, they are so focused on what they do that few of them really do much more outside of their profession. To get writing back on my mind, I started this blog. And because I did, I’ve met (at least in the online sense of met) some very cool people.