Question: How Does the Solitary Writer Find Balance?
People need people, but what if I want to write alone?
I wasn’t always a solitary writer. There was a time, eons ago, when I joined critique groups in order to get a better handle on what disinterested readers might be getting from my combination of words. I hung on their every word. For a while.
There was a time when I sat in a circle with other industrious writers, silently penning words on paper, assuming, along with everyone else, that there was a kind of creative osmosis going on and we were each drawing inspiration from the other. But were we?
There was a time when I desperately wanted validation from anyone who would read my stuff before I wasted any more time working on that mess. But when I realized I often came away more confused, I stopped.
Now I write alone. For better or worse, unless I have a paying gig, I’m my one and only editor. I don’t want anyone else’s input when I’m working, but I know that’s not every writer’s method. It’s mine because I’m most comfortable doing it that way, but I recognize there might be fatal flaws. I can’t be ruthless when it comes to my own babies.
But I love writing alone. I admire those writers who collaborate and seem to have so much fun doing it, but I couldn’t. Not ever. I’m that solitary writer.
So, here’s my question for today:
Do you share your writing before publishing or do you write completely alone? How is it working for you?
Comments are open (I promise!) so lay it on. Yes or no. What do you think?
It totally depends. I found tremendous value in being part of a critique group when I was regularly writing poetry and fiction. Now, not a single soul sees my newsletters before they are published (which may be a bad thing, I don't know).
I think we writers need to do what works best for us in this particular phase, and maybe it's less important whether we characterize ourselves as doing it one way or the other. We change, our work changes, our needs change.
In terms of my newsletter, I prefer mostly to write and edit alone. But there are definitely times when I find it hard to ascertain whether all of the necessary aspects of the point I'm trying to make have made it out of my brain and onto the page. Those are times when I wish I had an editor close at hand. The honest truth is that I don't get things done enough in advance to utilize an editor that I have to send things back and forth with.
With the book I'm working on, I'm going to share it with a couple of readers once the whole first draft is done. Well... maybe the second draft. Like Anne Lamott, I believe that a finished shitty first draft is better than never writing, so I might want to wait until the second one.