The Importance of Good Writing Communities
I want to tell you two stories: a good story and a bad story about writing communities I’ve been in. But I’ll start with the bad story, so we can end on a high note, and you can first learn what I think you should avoid.
Then I’ll give you something hopeful. Sound good? It’s time to get to the heart of why good—and not destructive—writing communities are so important.
First: the bad situation
I was in a novel-writing class—it was online. It was a 12-week class, so pretty long: 3 months. And it was modeled on each of us giving one another feedback, as many writing classes are.
This became all about ripping each other’s writing apart.
I don’t blame the teacher, who was doing the best she could to keep it from being that way.
But you know the saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link?
There was one member of this class— and I have since noticed that there is always this person – who uses certain creative writing education terminologies as if everyone should know it, and wields it like a weapon.
What’s the inciting incident? She would ask, assuming everybody knew what an inciting incident was, and that any story had to have one.
The teacher, who also seemed nervous about terms like inciting incident and whether a story had to have one, would do nothing to counter this kind of remark, leaving it hanging in the air to torture everyone in the room.
We would all be sitting there wondering, do I need to have an inciting incident? What is an inciting incident? Does everyone but me know what one is?
That the teacher wasn’t saying anything to confirm or deny whether a story even needed an inciting incident seemed to default to the interpretation that it did need one.
Over time, small comments like these, no matter how well intentioned, built an atmosphere of pretense, posturing, not being real, maybe being slightly competitive, and everyone feeling, I think, insecure.
I started to think of it more like military toot camp than like a writing class: something I had to go to, that I was supposed to endure to prove myself, as painful and destructive as it felt. Like I was supposed to be torn down before I could be built back up, and this was just a right of passage that all writers had to go through.
Listen, I was never in the military. But I was dating someone while he was at boot camp, and so I don’t think my description is that far off. The Army is one thing, but I don’t think a writing class needs to feel like hazing.
In fact, I now think that if it does feel like hazing, the person leading it is doing something wrong. Not only is it not necessary, it’s damaging.
I’ve had too many writers come crawling, beaten and battered, to my program, unable to write anymore, to feel any other way.
Your writing community should not make you feel bad about yourself, ever. It should not make you feel like you should know more than you do, that you aren’t as qualified as others in the room to be a writer, that you need to know certain terms of art like inciting incident and midpoint and dramatic irony in order to write a good book. You don’t.
You also don’t need to show not tell. You don’t need to write every day. You don’t need to have a ritual for writing or a place you go to right at the same time every day. You don’t need an MFA. You don’t need to have gone to college.
I am not pandering here. I don’t actually believe that everyone is capable of writing a book. It takes talent, a lot of perseverance, and determination. But I am saying that knowing literary jargon and being able to throw it around to make others feel bad is not the metric of talent or potential. These are the metrics of showmanship, ego, and insecurity.
Only you know how your writing community makes you feel. You may have a friend in your writing group or writing class who shows up every week delighted to be there, loving it, feeling charged by it. Great! Good for that friend. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. If it sucks the creative life out of you, I am giving you permission to honor that. Stop going to that group or class.
Takeaways:
It doesn’t have to be intentional to be bad and unhealthy; people’s hearts can be in the right place
You aren’t the crazy one for feeling icky and discouraged as you leave
Communities like this are destructive and will suck the creative life out of you
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to leave it. You could change it. But that takes a lot more work. And you may not be up for that.
It may be easier to just start a new one or find a different writing community. This is where I need to tell you that my writing community in the program I run, the Book Incubator, is nothing like this. It’s uplifting, supportive, and made up of serious writers who don’t take themselves too seriously because I don’t let them get away with throwing around creative “musts” that just stifle others.
Second: the good situation
Now, I want to tell you about a good writing community I’ve been a part of, and why I think it worked so well so that you can identify what makes one good or not, and if you want to find one for yourself.
I don’t just want to tell you about the one that I currently run, so I sadly found that I had to dig all the way back to high school to think of one.
But high school it was.
I went to a summer creative writing camp in New Mexico. There were about 15 of us, all teenagers, from all over the country. Every day we hiked and had creative exercises. There would be opportunities to share what we wrote, and we did share, but there was never any destructive feedback. The purpose of sharing was not to allow our peers to rip apart our writing. The purpose of sharing was to connect with the other writers by sharing what we were writing. That was it.
We were to be creative in community with one another, and to enjoy being with others who were also being creative. We weren’t viewing our community as a means to an end, as an opportunity to beat ourselves against a wall by subjecting ideas that weren’t ready for criticism to criticism.
As a result? I was the most creatively prolific I’ve ever been in my life. I wrote so much that week. I wrote poems, essays, journal entries… And I made friendships that I’m still maintaining to this day. Two weeks when I was 16 spawned lifelong friendships.
I showed up to sessions during those two weeks open and excited, and I left them inspired and feeling more connected to the world.
I should say here that nothing about the work we were doing was easy. I was being challenged on craft more than I had ever been before. I was also a public school kid who had basically read none of the “classics”, they were on scholarship, while the other people there were paying their way as private school students who had already read many of Shakespeare’s plays. That didn’t matter. I didn’t feel inferior. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t a part of the community, because that’s not how it was run.
It was run in a way that honored all of our differences and helped us lean into our individual strengths as writers. It was also run in a way that we could appreciate each other’s strengths as writers without feeling like we had to be just alike.
To this day when I think about it, I feel warm and loving feelings toward every person from that group, and I feel so grateful that I got to be a part of it.
Now that is a good writing community.
You want a writing community that makes you feel those ways: like you are a part of something, like there are people rooting for you, like they see you and want you to succeed in the way that you uniquely are made to.
That’s the kind of community I run inside my program, the Book Incubator, and that’s the kind of community I want you to find for yourself, whether it’s the Book Incubator or somewhere else.
Because writing is a long, solitary endeavor. There is so much of it that happens alone in the echo chamber of our own mind.
Having people who are on the journey with you is the difference between succeeding and failing by giving up, because it’s just too hard to do by yourself, but it can also mean the difference between it being lonely and it being full of companionship.
I want you to write a book and for it to be your best possible book, but I also want you to have a good life. And a writing community will help you have a good life while you’re writing books.
So whether it’s my program or another community, find one for yourself. It’s so worth it.
Ready to write your book?
If you made it this far, I’m guessing that you are writing a book, or want to write a book.
If so, I want to talk to you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it.
Because before I published my novels, I first had to figure out how to write one. It wasn't easy because none of the writing classes I was taking showed me how to actually write a novel.
Not until I had a newborn and only a couple of hours to write did I come up with a process. The process worked. I wrote my entire novel during my 8-week maternity leave. Now, I teach it in my program, the Book Incubator, and it works for dozens of other writers.
If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my exact process for writing a book. You can get it by clicking below and answering two questions to apply to the program. You get the video whether you join or not—no pressure to enroll.
Just click below to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I’m so excited to hear from you!
