Writers Helping Writers
Writing is a lonely profession in many ways: you work alone for hours upon hours, wearing the nastiest of outfits. Your closest companions are characters you’ve invented—who become more real each day. If you’re obsessive (like yours truly)you eat at your desk, or, at best, gobble something down while flipping the pages of the newspaper at a speed that precludes any fact absorption.
If you’re lucky, you have a writer’s group which nurses you through draft after draft of your novel—people who will be honest (“no, you can’t send that out until you go do one more revision!”) and who will also be generous enough to help you keep going, even through rough beginning time when you are desperate for a bit of approbation(“yes, that is a beautiful passage about friendship; look at that gorgeous line!”) If you’re very lucky, perhaps some of those groups were led by Jenna Blum and under the auspice of Grub Street.
If you’re lucky, you have honest and trusted writer friends, willing to tear your work apart (with love) time after time and build you up when necessary. Without them, life would be a bear. Thank you, Ginny DeLuca.
When you’re finished with your work, if you’re lucky, you have friends who will listen sympathetically when you receive yet another rejection, read your fifteenth query iteration, and agree that agents are terrible, mean people—until you get your agent. Then they say, “Yes, she is truly a gifted and prescient woman!”
And, if you are truly lucky, when your book is about to release, you will have friends who offer love and support for years and months. Friends who are in the same boat, like Beth Hoffman, whose book SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT is being released today, the first pick for the Sam’s Club bookstore! Her publishers are sending her on a whirlwind tour, and still, still she finds time to tout my book.
Or, if you’re lucky, you have a friend like Melanie Benjamin, whose ALICE I HAVE BEEN also comes out today. Melanie is reeling from interviews and bookstore visits, yet she took the time to publicize my book review in the Boston Globe (cute how I got that in, huh?).
I am grateful for my writers groups: Grub Street, The Splinters, The Council, my promo-support group which includes already published writers Chris Abouzied, Lisa Borders, and Carol Newman Cronin, soon-to-release writers Holly LeCraw and Iris Gomez, and Roberta Gately, and newly agented-soon-to-sell writers Nichole Bernier and Kathleen Crowley—watch for their websites to be announced here!
There are so many more writers on whom I rely and who I hope rely on me. Each deserves her own page, but I’ll start with Diane Butkus, wonderful and kindhearted essayist, and Susan Knight, writer of much comfort.
I definitely have to write many more posts to include everyone (please see previous post, Writers As Fairy Godmothers.)
Oh, and of course, when I need a friend, 24/7, Backspace for Writers is there.
For a practitioner of a lonely profession, I sure am blessed to have so much company.
Subscribe