WRITERS SOCIALIZING WITH WRITERS

My aunt warned me about writers socializing.

I’d taken the train from Philadelphia to Princeton, New Jersey for a visit.

She was studying at the Princeton Theological Seminary to be a preacher; I was in the Army learning to be a writer.

Since she had a degree in literary criticism she had a lot to say to a kid confessing he wanted to write.

The most important thing she said:

Never join a group with writers socializing. It takes away from writing time and creates doubt and loss of confidence.

Like every music store guitar hero shredding up and down the fingerboard, but never plays publicly, a group of writers give off a similar vibe.

If it’s not their education at a name brand school, it’s their publishing history at name brand companies.

I like to imagine what it feels like to carry a prestigious degree from a celebrated school along with publication of a game-changing book from with an internationally admired media company.

Just imagining what writers must feel like is an unending task.

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Writing Is Like Food Channel ‘Chopped’

If you write something for others to read, something not locked away in your ‘confession diary’, they are consuming your work.

In comparison, if you cook on the Food Channel’s ‘Chopped’, judges are consuming your work.

The difference is the reader isn’t staring at you like a Chopped judge.

They remind me of dogs staring at their owners while taking a dump.

As your dog squats, do you notice that she stares at you while doing her business? You’d think she’d look away in hopes of getting a little privacy, but she locks eyes with you instead. That’s because when your dog is in that pooping position, she’s vulnerable, and she’s looking to you to protect her.

If you’ve seen Chopped, then you know the judges are vulnerable to bad cooking or food poisoning. They have a look that says it’s happened before.

Writers never see the look of readers who either turn the page and continue, or put the work down and walk away.

But they see the looks of their teachers, like the top image of Harvard’s English Department, and that’s enough.

It’s enough for that vulnerable feeling.

Real Life Writers Socializing

You can’t avoid writers socializing if you attend any community writing classes.

They tend to draw writers who explain their work, their thirty year writer’s block, their writing journey.

Most are looking for inspiration, enough inspiration to call themselves writers without shame.

They like to talk about pages and structure and genre and format and synopsis and query letters and the right way to submit.

What they don’t talk about is what they did that day since most of them are struggling with a work in progress they want to forget.

I tell the story about joining a writers’ group led by an Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate.

A name brand program is a good draw, except they downplayed the importance of their degree.

Instead, they claimed EST had a bigger impact on their work than Iowa.

By January, 1977, some 100,000 people, including celebrities like John Denver, Yoko Ono and Carly Simon, have taken the 60-hour est training, paying $300 for training that required that they submit to name-calling and “agreements” governing when they could sleep, eat or go to the bathroom.

The big impact for me in the writers group was the teacher telling her publication story.

She kept a promise to herself to write every day, beginning with short scenes around her neighborhood to warm up for her serious writing.

When she submitted both warm up and serious writing, the warm ups found a home.

Instead of work shedding light on the darkness of the soul, she got paid for writing about two squirrels watching a new family move into a house near their tree.

That’s who she was.

Writers And Readers Together

A reviewer wrote about a writer’s book.

It didn’t go well.

Two years later, Ford was still pissed enough to approach Whitehead at a Poets & Writers party. “I’ve waited two years for this,” he said. “You spat on my book.”

Then he spat on Whitehead. Reporting this to Deborah Schoenman, Whitehead said, “We had a few heated words—he said, ‘You’re a kid, you should grow up,’ which coming from him was a bit funny—and then he stalked off.

This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me, and it probably won’t be the last. But I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”

Things got spitty.

Whatever else you do, keep your spit in your mouth.

The only time spit between two men should be shared outside of their bromance is when one fighter smacks another so hard the spit and snot and sweat flies into the first few rows outside the ring.

Bring a newspaper.

Literary spit, Lit Spit, is not cool.

If you feel like you need to spit on someone for writing a bad review, do something else, like write a better book.

Or, be better at writers socializing with writers, which happens every day if you look for it.

You know it when you see it. It’s a Facebook post, a twitter tweet, a family group text.

When we read certain word combinations that spark interest, we are writers socializing enough.

Now go write. Look, a squirrel.