Writing Is Not A Solitary Career

Okay, so most of the writers I know are introverts.  Maybe the invention of the Internet has taught us to avoid people at all costs.  Books hold a great deal of information, but it is the information you get from people that separates your story from a history paper.  All writing needs some basic human elements and you can't have human elements without people.  The really interesting thing about writing is how it forces those introverts to go out into the big, scary world and interact with other people.  Maybe we've forgotten that along the way.

Along with gathering useful information from friends and (if you must) family, networking can be beneficial to not just the collection of information, but the stamina of your writing career.  Let me put that another way, writers need to stay motivated any way they can.

For years, people had been telling me that I needed to join a writing group, because writers need to be around other writers.  Eventually, I gave in.  And, I must say, I'm so glad I did.  I won't say that every meeting or even every group was the most wonderful experience of my life--some were flat-out boring--but what was true of these special outings was how inspired I felt after attending even just one meeting.  We would read through each other's work (something I was absolutely terrified to do at first) and make suggestions.

I'll never forget one of the people there.  He had some funny little accent.  It kind of reminded me of the sound you get when you simultaneously strangle a Brit and an Australian.  Anyway, he thought he was God's gift to writing.  I thought his writing was boring, but then, politics have never really interested me, so maybe I was being unfair.  The reason I bring him up is because, despite having very little in common in our writing styles and preferences, he was the first person I had ever met who would take my one or two page document and write all over it.  At the time, I thought, "What nerve!"  Then, once I got home and actually read what he had said, I found myself more motivated to write than I had been in a long time.  Long story short, network.  Network in as many ways as you can.  Writers write.  That is all that separates us from other professionals: they write because they have to (memos, emails, etc); we write because it is what we were born to do.