5 - Community

A proposition: "It's not what you do, it's who you do it with." This is one of those unsourceable quotes, so generic and trite that it's hard to imagine a specific person conceiving and saying it for the first time, but also not ubiquitous enough that it feels right to call it an adage or an aphorism. I first heard it from John Green, (here) and then in the song "Cecily Smith" from the musical Fly by Night. 

My thinking about this phrase fits neatly with the ideas about means and ends I've been exploring in this blog so far. The phrase asserts that not things which are done but people and relationships are the goal, the end, the it of life. But implicit in the little reversal is that doing things is the way to form and have relationships, that there can be no with without do, which positions the doing of things as the means. Alternately, the phrase almost seems to imagine life as a chronological journey from doing alone to doing with: from a solipsistic fixation on things that are done—careers, pursuits, hobbies—to the revelation that people are what's really important. The 90's movie career-obsessed-family-neglecting dad character arc. John Green has made a lot of observations that are adjacent to this. He's quoted the poet Donald Hall in talking about the "third things" that bring two people together. He's also talked about coming to the realization that art needs to be made as a gift to people (which I mentioned in my last post) and how that not only brought meaning to his life but improved his writing as well. 

This is a good truism, as far as truisms go. I feel like I generally agree. But writing fiction is a strange thing to apply it to. Writing is usually a solitary activity. For me, it's especially solitary; privacy is an important part of my writing routine, and I have trouble writing if someone else is in the room, let alone writing as part of a collaborative process. Obviously this is only an expectation our society has placed upon fiction writing as an artistic medium, and that expectation is often defied. Many novels and stories are written in collaboration, and there exist exercises such as exquisite corpse writing and… I don't know, two people writing stories and then combining them such that the text alternates between the two source texts every line, or something. I'm sure someone's done that at some point. I concede, the social expectation of writing as a solitary activity is definitely informed by the inherent qualities of the activity. If you reinvented human society from the beginning one-hundred-thousand times, you'll probably never get a society where writers are expected, as a matter of course, to gather in a room with other writers and ply their trade collaboratively, but where it's unusual for musicians or thespians to make collaborative works. And I often find myself jealous of other mediums, such as music or theatre, which better lend themselves to collaboration. And why is that, if writing as an activity is, on some level, inherently solitary?

The truth, reader, is that I do crave community in my pursuit of writing, and right now I don't have it. I wish to do with, though I would never, in seeking to do with, forsake my precious, precious, doing alone. Because writing is so solitary, it often, though not always, feels rather lonely. I want to share my pursuit, if not my work, although maybe sometimes my work, because perhaps it's not possible to do one without the other, with others. And already, we're getting confused here, because when it comes to community in writing, there's a difference between collaboration, sharing (as with an audience), and… mutual pursuit, which is a separate thing I'll get around to. I've had a lot of experiences with community in writing—and a lot of scuttled attempts to find satisfying community in writing—that are some combination of these three categories. A lot of times, for better or for worse, the categories unexpectedly bleed into one another. So I'll talk about some of those experiences now in an attempt to get at why I haven't been fully satisfied with any of them, and what a satisfying community experience might look like for me. 

My first experience with writing in community was also perhaps one of my first experiences with writing. The community consisted of myself and my Granny, and she was partly my audience and partly my collaborator. Because I was five or six years old and the physical act of writing with pencil and paper was a difficult chore for me, she would dictate stories I would speak out loud. To this day, she remains my best and only amanuensis. At that point, writing in community was a necessary part of the process for me. If dictation didn't reduce the friction of the artistic process to the point where I would willingly engage, and if I didn't have the encouragement of an enthusiastic audience, I wouldn't have written stories; it's that simple. The friction of the physical act of writing remained a major obstacle for many years. I had ideas and visions but was unwilling to spend the time. When I did commit to something for long enough to produce a finished, or often an unfinished, product, I still enlisted my family as my audience. They were always supportive, and usually enthusiastic, but sometimes less so—not for a lack of supportiveness but because they didn't quite understand what I was going for. Like I mentioned in the last post, I was writing not to cater to their tastes, but to explore my own vision, and that didn't always align. But generally speaking, my non-Granny family members did not become my collaborators in any sense. None of them are creative writers themselves, so they didn't often comment on my work from a craft perspective. Sometimes I interpreted that lack of comment as a lack of enthusiasm and took it personally, but looking back now, I sort of appreciate not having any creative writers in my family. I had all their support, for which I am infinitely grateful, but no expectations or critiques. 

Sharing stories or, more often, story ideas, with my friends in school usually resulted in polite interest, gentle ridicule, or, troublingly, unsolicited comments on craft. I didn't have many friends who were also interested in being writers, and I shared my work because I wanted an audience, not because I wanted critique. But I did have friends who were burgeoning creatives in other fields, and critique is often what they offered. It was unwanted, and it was bad critique, but we were kids. Sometimes, sharing with friends who were interested in being writers had even worse results. In middle school, I think, I once shared a worldbuilding doc with such a friend of mine and about ten minutes later, somehow, they had become a collaborator on the project—a full-blown coauthor of the future novel, if I remember correctly, though I might be misremembering. I did agree to this, but in retrospect I'd argue it was a little bit of an overreach for my friend to even ask, and my consent was given without full consideration of the implications. We didn't continue to work on the doc for longer than a week—perhaps not even longer than that afternoon—and in the end the whole affair had about the same level of consequence as a group of third-graders starting a rock 'n' roll band. But I do remember getting a sick feeling in my stomach when I realized that what had started as my vision was no longer completely mine. As I've established, I'm rather personally attached to my vision, so any form of collaboration that encroaches further upon my vision than I'm prepared for is a non-starter. And I've been on the other side of it too. Once in college a friend of mine told me they were having trouble with an aspect of a story they were working on. I offered to "help," they said okay, and I offered a bunch of my own ideas, which they incorporated into the story. In retrospect, that was way too far; it wasn't help but encroachment, and as a result the integrity of their vision as a thing all their own, suffered.

Just about everything I've discussed so far, besides my family's passive absorption of my work, is a form of collaboration, by a broad definition of collaboration which is assisting or influencing an artist's process in any way, shape, or form. My Granny's dictation was a form of collaboration that encroached on my vision not at all—she was recording my actual words with the utmost fidelity and, if I may say, professionalism. Critique is a form of collaboration that often encroaches on the artist's vision, or at the very least on their ego—and at times it can be difficult to tell the difference. And actual contribution of ideas to the work as a coequal partner, or, as it's often known, collaboration, is collaboration. And what my early experiences with collaboration and community taught me is that carefully negotiated and firm boundaries are a must. This isn't an advice blog, but nonetheless here's a single piece of unsolicited advice: if someone gives you their work to read, don't give them advice or critique unless you secure their permission or, better yet, if they solicit it from you first. Because if they don't solicit your advice, they're probably not looking for a critique partner/collaborator—they're just looking for an audience. And that's okay. Nowadays, I sometimes share my work with friends. To be completely honest, in my heart of hearts, what I'm looking for when I do this is a small audience, and the feedback I'd ideally want would be only the positive or maybe even none at all. That said, it's sort of unfair to ask my friends to offer only unconditional praise in reaction to my work, and I do want to hear some of what they think. Not to mention, my friends are all creative types, they're inclined to offer some sort of craft commentary, and I wouldn't want to ask them to restrain themselves. So I try to make it very clear what kind of comments I'm looking for and what kind of comments I'm not, and let that act as a boundary.

Moving on, I went to the University of Iowa and majored in English and creative writing. While I was there, I took many, many classes that featured writing workshop sessions. Iowa happens to be the home of the original Writers' Workshop (capital Ws) and the birthplace of the workshop model, and the undergraduate workshop-style classes are modeled on the practices of the capital-Ws graduate program. After a number of lectures on writing theory, a concept of which many people, sometimes including those giving the lectures, were frequently skeptical, we would turn in short stories, everyone else would read and mark them up, and then we'd sit in a big circle and talk about them. There has been much ink split and much breath spent on proper writing workshop procedure, but in my view it all comes down to defining and negotiating the boundaries of creative collaboration—those same boundaries which, in my earlier experiences, had been so often encroached upon. The two major commandments to which most workshops subscribe are these: the writer being workshopped upon shall not speak during the workshop, and the critiques or comments given to that writer shall not be prescriptive. This has been put in many different ways: make your critiques constructive, point out problems but don't impose solutions, consider what the story is trying to do and not what you want it to do, etc. All of these ideas are essentially safeguards against creative encroachment. I further discern two types of non-prescriptive workshop comments, which different workshops emphasize to different degrees. First, there's emotional reactions to the text, or what I like to call guinea pig comments. Workshoppers say: I was excited at this point in the text, I was confused at that point, I was sad at this point. The writer essentially treats the workshoppers as guinea pigs having tests done on them and sees how their reactions match up with the reactions they desire and envision. This is part of the reason why writer's aren't supposed to speak during workshop: commenting on or explaining the text has undue influence on reader reactions and skews the data. Then there are vision-conscious craft critiques. These are comments that take into account the story's vision—what the story is trying to do—and identify how it's currently falling short, thus giving the author areas to reevaluate and work on, though most workshops, as I mentioned, ask participants not to propose solutions because it's seen as an encroachment on that boundary—an injection of foreign material into the pure vision, like what I did with my college friend. But hold up: back in middle school, I saw any critique at all as an encroachment. The difference is mostly that in a writing workshop setting I solicit and expect critique, but why should I expect critique to be more useful and more respectful of my vision in the rarefied air of a writing workshop than in the sloppy-joe scented miasma of a middle school cafeteria? Making useful vision-conscious craft critiques is hard. Understanding a story's vision in the first place requires close-reading, empathy, and often a certain amount of genre savvy. Offering critique that points to how the author could bring the work closer to its vision requires even closer reading, a framework of writing theory through which to view stories, and a shared technical vocabulary with which to refer to that framework, which is why those classes all started with lectures on theory: one reason writing workshop participants are credible as critique partners is that we all just sat through six weeks of lectures, so we all share a little framework and vocabulary. But the bigger reason is the last form of writing community, which I haven't talked about yet: mutual pursuit. In a writing workshop, in theory, everyone's interested in writing, at least enough to enroll in the class, and everyone's written, at the very, very least, one or two short stories. There's an understanding of what it's like to be a writer and what feedback is useful to writers that you won't get from sharing your work with non-writer friends. And everyone wants useful feedback, so they're motivated to offer useful feedback themselves—it's an act of reciprocity. This understanding and reciprocity is what's missing from the middle school lunchroom and from sharing work with non-writer friends. Now that I've graduated and moved away from Iowa City, I often find myself missing it. 

But that said, how much was the mutual pursuit of a writing workshop worth, really? Our mutual pursuit of short story writing came in the form of a homework assignment. Mixed into those classes were aspiring professionals, seasoned hobbyists, people who were curious about writing, and, in the lower level classes, people who didn't care and were only there for the credit. And even as I got into the higher level classes where people were more serious, there remained major divides between people who wrote in different genres and people who were interested in writing in different forms—short stories or novels or personal essays or screenplays or for video games or what have you. As someone who was interested in writing novels, I actually found myself in a very small cohort at Iowa. In the summer after my freshman year, I finished my first novel, but the group of people who had done that was even smaller, and since college I don't believe I've met anyone who's finished a book. 

Writing workshops outside of an academic setting are called writing groups, and I'd like to be a part of one, both to get useful critique and to experience a sense of mutual pursuit. Maybe I'm being overly particular, but my ideal of mutual pursuit in such a setting is pretty granular. I'd really like to be a part of a writing group who are actively writing novels as a pursuit and are serious about finishing them—adult fantasy and sci-fi novels if possible—because that's what I'm doing, and those are the people who would best understand my pursuit and best be able to offer me useful critique. And it might be blunt to say, but I would want to like and think highly of the work being produced in that group. I've had it happen before where I exchanged work with people, both in and out of formal workshops, and didn't enjoy what they shared with me—just didn't think it was very good. And I could've talked about the craft shortcomings I perceived until I was blue in the face—maybe the craft was legitimately lacking and the work was falling far short of its vision, or maybe its vision was so different from my own that I just didn't get what it was going for, but in either case, being a part of a community with those people wouldn't have been useful or fulfilling to me for very long. Membership in the kind of ideal writing group I describe would encompass all three types of community: sharing, collaboration, and mutual pursuit. 

But I'd also like to have friends who seriously pursue writing in other genres and other forms. I probably wouldn't be interested in collaborating with them as critique partners, and perhaps not even in sharing work unless it's finished and polished, but the sense of mutual pursuit would still remain. And I want that mutual pursuit because I want more community in my life in general. Making friends as an adult is hard, mutual interests are helpful, and writing is by far my biggest interest. Having people to talk to about those things that only writers understand, to kvetch and revel over words with, would be a joy. In other words… sigh… it's not what you do, it's who you do it with.

After graduating college, I've tried to join some writing groups or attend workshop-like events, and I've met some fellow writers as well, but I've always been stymied by circumstance (fuck meeting on Zoom) or one of the numerous stumbling blocks I've outlined above, most frequently that the person I meet isn't pursuing writing in the same way I am. Once again, love and prosperity to all hobbyists everywhere. But I'll keep trying, because I want that community, and I think it could end up being very important for me. One of the reasons I even started this website was so that I might share it with other writers I meet so that they can get a vibe for my work and see if they're interested in continuing contact. So if you're someone I met in real life and you're enjoying this site, shoot me a text. Let's talk shop sometime.