The Community of Writing

A few days ago, I looked over a synopsis for a friend. She had been feeling like she could not even look at her project any more. No more! I know that feeling. You just feel like if you have to read that scene or synopsis or work on it one more time, you'll throw up or bash your head on the keyboard repeatedly.

It's one of the reasons I'm so glad I have relationships with other writers. Because we all get there. And sometimes we can help each other through it. Fresh eyes are always a good thing.

I had a dream last week about a writers' meeting. I was leading it at a house near where my parents live. It's a house I've dreamed about before, but always in my dream, no one owns it or the owner is not in the house. In this dream, the whole house was filled with people. I recognized some faces. Others were new to me.

I'm not sure what it means, if anything... but I know two things:

One is that I have grown more as a writer in the last year than I did in the previous ten years. Having good partners and mentors has made all that difference for me.

Two is that I want to remember how important mentoring has been in my life as a writer. And at some point, I want to sew into the lives of other young writers.

I just really believe this is a process that benefits from being in a community. I look at the friendship between J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. There's something invaluable about being able to talk shop with another writer, to bounce ideas off of each other and solve all of the problems in the literary world.

I'm not saying you CAN'T write a book without mentors or critique partners. I'm just saying that iron sharpens iron. Allowing other writers to read your stuff and mentor you sharpens your craft and theirs. Everybody wins. Can't beat that.