Social Needs for a Solitary Art
Most of us, when we learn about writing or even when we think about it, imagine a solitary pursuit. We envision the writer alone in an office (preferably lined with books and a leather armchair, with huge windows looking out on a garden… and why not, we can all dream!). I always felt cheated and cheap when I couldn’t generate all that I needed for a project on my own – I felt like that made me less of a writer. My best ideas came (and still come) from tossing things back and forth with friends. Something about explaining things for someone else and leaping one thought off another really opens me up and makes the waters pour. I still feel a little guilty about it sometimes, though.
But becoming an editor makes it all the more clear for me that writing isn’t really a solitary pursuit. Parts of it, yes, are best accomplished alone, preferably locked in a room with no access to the internet or other potential distractions. In all of us, I think, there is a little bit of the great Douglas Adams, whose editors famously had to lock him in a room to make him actually write. (Sometimes, knowing how much he would love smartphones and iPads, I wonder how he would ever get anything done now that he could have all the distractions in the world hidden in his pocket – they would have had to take his phone away, too!) But the other thing Adams needed in order to write was an audience. He wanted to read the words he’d written out loud, and get reactions from his editor to goad him on.
I don’t think you could pay me enough at this point in my career to read my first drafts aloud. But the impulse is very familiar. As authors, when we hand over a draft to a friend or loved one, isn’t there a terrible temptation to hover and watch their reactions? Was that a chuckle? What page are they on? Are they finding the protagonist sympathetic so far? That automatic response is part of why plotting and working with someone else is so fulfilling for the writers who do it, I think – we don’t have to slog through several thousand words before we figure out that x y z plotline isn’t working, or that such-and-such character is coming off a little flat. Someone’s right there reacting as we go.
The same sort of impulse is there in editing. Writers cut the vein and bleed onto the pages, and then… what? Rewrite, certainly. But you can only look at your own words so many times before you need another pair of eyes, and while husbands and wives and best friends can sometimes be great first readers, if they’re not a writing professional or that rare perfect reader who knows how to read intelligently and explain what’s working and what isn’t without getting caught up too far in their personal feelings about the writer and his or her work, there’s only so far they can go. At best, the editor is another piece in the social puzzle along with writing groups or partners, the network that helps a writer get from the first kernel of the idea on to the first draft and out to the finished manuscript.
The internet provides an amazing tool for writers, being a famously house-locked bunch, to network without having to necessarily leave our desks. Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time talking shop with my writer friends at coffee or at knitting retreats or pretty much anywhere, but it’s damned convenient to be able to look up my friends’ blogs, see what they’re working on and what troubles they’re running into, and email my writing partner at any hour of the day knowing that she’ll get back to me with a response to whatever cracked-up plot twist I’ve lately been considering.
The stereotype of writers is that we’re a lonely bunch, wandering universes untold within our own minds. And that’s true, I think, to some extent. But, much like how part of the fun of a vacation is telling all the stories when you get home, it’s awfully nice to have people we can share the journey with.
