A Writer’s Notebook: writers talk writing

The exercise

This exercise is one I’ve long thought important but hadn’t seen in exercise lists until a week or so ago. Pretty much every writer and every writing text will tell you about the importance of writing groups or communing with other writers for perspective, and the writing community makes an appearance in at least five of my Fourteen Principles for Creative Writers. It’s a fairly common truism, but because it’s so commonly espoused, it somehow misses most lists of writing exercises. Maybe we think of it as more a philosophical ideal and less of a practical, craft-building exercise. But about a week ago, I found this sense of community on a list of ten creative writing exercises, and it’s the first item on the list.

I’d link you to that list, but it has since disappeared from the Web. But the gist of the exercise is this:

Find people with whom you can share your writing and your ideas about writing. This isn’t quite the same as finding a critique group, because you’re after more than comments on individual stories: you’re looking for people you can bounce ideas off of, people whose brains you can pick and who want to pick your brains in return. And as much as I love sitting around the coffeehouse with fellow writers and sharing ideas over a latte, these don’t have to be writers in your neighborhood. Two of the three writers I included here started out as friends I lived near — Justin is an old, good friend from my days as an undergrad, and Ryan was an undergrad mentee when I was teaching college in Wisconsin — but both of the discussions I’ve included here happened via e-mail long after I’d moved away from my writing friends. And Michelle and I met through this blog and have never seen each other in real life. The writing community is unbounded by geography — you can swap ideas on the phone, online, in letters, in any way you can think of.

The important thing to remember is that you should be learning from that community. And that’s where the exercise and the notebook come into play. You should be writing down the conversations you have and the answers to questions you’ve asked. If you’re exchanging e-mails, save those e-mails — that’s part of the notebook, too. If you haven’t met any writers yet, find them: Attend readings and ask questions, look for writing groups or start your own, find the websites and blogs of writers you admire and send e-mails or leave comments. By doing so, you join the writing community and help shape it as much as you are shaped by it.