Because you have an active mind you likely have lots of friends. Some of them are connected to your writing self, some not. You have friends you have coffee with at work, meet on the football field or like hanging out with. Maybe they have nothing to do with your writing self.
But who would you call your writing friends? Your writers group? Blog friends who write? People you meet once a year at the writers conference?
Do you remember being introduced to someone by a mutual friend:
“This is Samantha. You’ll like her, she’s a writer too.”
You say, “Hi. I write fantasy.”
Samantha says “I write a regular column for “The Weekly Grain Farmer”.
Not a friendship made in heaven. So who counts as writer friends?
Your writers group as a whole or just a few members? If it’s just a few members is that because they write in your genre or because something about them connects with you?
How do you feel about people who read your work and say, “It was lovely.” Period. End of subject
If pressed, they say, “Well I read it through to the end, but why did she have to die? A happy ending would have been nicer.”
It was probably your mom speaking. You love her, but she just doesn’t get it.
How important is ‘getting it’? Because if they don’t get it you’re not going to be comfortable sharing your work with them.
Are you finding that with your blog you’re becoming friends with, sharing ideas with, some people with a totally different background from the continent far away?
With social media this is becoming commonplace, but the additional element of “writing friend” puts it into a special category.
I’ve had one writing friend for a few years.. A writing friend knows a whole dimension of you that other the friends don’t know.
It’s not just that with her I can discuss markets or problems with a scene. It’s that she gets that big part me that other people just tiptoe around. A writing friend understands the complications of creativity. They see how the ‘real world’ isn’t enough. She gets it – my reality doesn’t end with here and now, it has additional dimensions. So does hers.
Other people seem comfortable thinking they know reality. They have a firm grasp on it. Writers – and other artists – wonder about the reality of place and time. They see it not as part of the real and only world but as a finite starting point for all that might be.
I think those who share your ideas, those who “get you” are your true writing friends. Kolkata or Christchurch, Fresno or Dalien are just dots on a map, barely visible in our infinity.
Your writing friend is the one “gets” your inner world.
I think writing friends are also just the people you trust, even if they write different genrés. The people you don’t want to lose. My “writing friends” are all friends from a Writers’ Club we started in college and from the Writing Center many of us worked at, but after years they’d become drinking buddies and the friends I trust with my problems, as well as my stories. I know I can trust them to read my manuscript and tell me what’s what, the same as I’d do for them. We may be scattered across the country now, but I can’t imagine ever sending my stories to anyone else.
You are so lucky!
Also so right. Once you have a group who see (reasonably) eye to eye who grow together and develop that trust you have something of great value. I’ve found one or two good writing friends along the way, as paths crossed for a while, and I have treasured them. A solid group like the one you have? Wow!
I have friends still from high school days and they are dear to me, but they are not writers. It’s that extra dimension. As you say, people you trust – and in a very unique way.
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