First Sunday Q&A: Learning to Trust Your Writing Community
Isolation may produce more work, but when you trust enough to find your artistic family--the people who love what you create--it helps you grow even more
“First Sunday” Q&A is where we dissect and discuss your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. I plan to write this the first Sunday of each month for you, as long as you wonderful people send me your questions. My intention is to make this a safe, generous place to exchange ideas and talk about the deepest writing and publishing issues on your mind. If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll get a taste of the article below. Upgrade to paid (only $45 a year) to read the rest and receive First Sunday each month. Your subscription also supports me continuing to write my free newsletter each Friday.
Q: I admit I’m a bit of a misfit and I’m sorry about it—sometimes. But my question for you is about my confused feelings about manifesting a nurturing creative community for myself. Maybe I don’t really appreciate the value of community in the arts and that’s the core problem? Past experience has mostly shown me that artists are super competitive by nature, often not that nice, because there is only so much to go around and there are a lot of us. Just look at how hard it is to get published today. But the bottom line is that writing is soooo lonely, and I am realizing that isolation doesn’t serve me.
Can you share any insights on how find an ideal community as a writer? But even more, how to trust that community and grow from it? What steps would you advise or have others taken to get over this leeriness? (Thank you. I love this newsletter, btw.)
A: Well, thanks for the kind words and for this honest question. I think many of us wonder about topics like competition and trust in the creative life, and I admire this writer for putting such strange and uncomfortable feelings into words.
Have you experienced that truly difficult place she’s talking about? I certainly have.
I think about this a lot, as a writer. Is it because we were trained (subtly or overtly) to be competitive in school? In school competition—in most competitions—some win, and many lose. I also think about the inclusive/exclusive, belong and not-belong, conundrum of those clubs and cliques we long to join and may not be able to. The cool group and the nerds, and all of those (me included) in between.
Where did we find a place to fit and feel good about ourselves? Who could we trust to accept us—and our creativity—exactly as it is?
I was listening to singer/songwriter Antje Duvoket this week. She has an older song, “Glamorous Girls,” which is about this very feeling and how, when we’re young, it hurts so much to be unaccepted, and how maybe we look back, years later, and realize we did ok to be on our own.
Do you have to be on your own?
But do you have to go it alone? I wonder. I think perhaps my personal creative spirit was given a boost by not fitting in, when I was young. My family definitely believed in me as a creative artist, but school was so far from a nurturing place for that. Misfit-hood was felt even more strongly in college, but I was never happier than in my art classes. A community that was full of people like me, everyone painted or wrote in isolation.
But were we really a community? Maybe we were just a holding place to learn skills and find our way. We certainly didn’t bond very often. It was accepted that your best work was done in silence, away from others.
It wasn’t until I found what I wanted to create, as I ventured out into the world with my creative expression—writing and art—that I felt a real need for community.
Gap between skill and taste
In the womb of creativity, when I was working alone, I competed mostly with myself—with my own skill levels. My process was whatever talent, skill, or ability I could muster, to translate my inner experiences and sense of the world to an outer canvas or page. Sometimes I got it, sometimes I didn’t, and I had to go back to hone those skills. My process at that level was judged by teachers and peers, but especially by me.
It was hard. Very common for artists or writers in training to feel they are far from their ideal, in terms of skill. (This classic video by Ira Glass on the gap between taste and ability is worth a re-watch.)
Learning is what we were here for, though. So we acknowledge the gap and try to lessen it with more learning.
Eventually, a product we create pleases us. Maybe it gets a teacher’s thumbs up or a peer’s. Maybe these small encouragements boost the next step: we take the risk of publication, sharing our writing with the world. That’s when we enter a new level of competition and the loneliness of no community gets even more pronounced.
I know that publication is the holy grail for most writers who are reaching for it. I’ve been there. I have to say, though, that once it’s achieved, once you have the agent and the contract, the story’s only just beginning. If you’re totally alone when that happens, if you don’t have your network of support, it’s much, much harder.
Why? Because even those who receive all the signs that the work is worthwhile aren’t convinced unless a community reflects it back. It takes hard work to venture out into the world with your creative efforts. It requires much effort to sustain the belief in self and keep going.
I believe—and it might just be me—that the solo creator, the one who stays in isolation, sees the other artist who wins an award or gets a movie deal and they feel more of a twinge. They may think, One less opportunity for me.
Stronger belief in self
Of course, this creates a vicious cycle: The fear these thoughts generate makes us less generous, less able to reach out and create a support network. Essentially, we back away from the very nurturing that could keep us going forward.
Since this has happened to me, and I learned the hard way about community, I think it’s helpful to do all we can to get a stronger belief in ourselves as creators before we risk publication or sharing our work. The stronger belief is hard to generate alone, though. You may be more able than I have been. But I’ve mostly found this via my carefully curated community.
With my community at my back, no matter the outer reflection by the world, I continue to believe not only in myself but in others. I cultivate generosity. I am able to sincerely wish others the best.
It was a long road to get there, though.
Reaching out
For two years, I was intrigued by a young writer in my MFA class. I was in my fifties when I went back to grad school for my MFA, and he was in his late twenties, perhaps. I watched how he moved through those two years of very hard work and tremendous output. When we both graduated, his debut already had both an agent and publisher, and not long after, the book got optioned for a movie.
My first reaction was predictable: I was jealous, and I wondered what made him special. Was it talent? There seemed to be something beyond talent that attracted such success.
I saw how easily he created a community around himself. Always with a group of people, always talking to teachers, unlike loner me. I imagined how comfortable he must have felt in his own skin at that young age to be so at ease with others. And he knew the value of community, not just for contacts and networking, although that is always a big part of such programs. He was generous at heart and he cared about other writers. This was evident in class.
How did someone create community? What benefits might it give me?
It’s never just about your work
I am not at ease in groups of people I don’t know, so it has always been hard for me to push forward and be recognized for myself, rather than my work. I want the recognition of my artistic work to be solely on the work’s merit.
In the real world of publishing today, in the hugely competitive art world, that is a sweet fantasy.