Writing in Community and Writing Alone

by Stephanie Morrill

Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and the Ellie Sweet books (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website including the free novella, Throwing Stones.

The reason I wanted to create Go Teen Writers was because for years I was very alone as a writer. I had lots of supportive people in my life, thankfully, but they weren't people who had ever been in the trenches of story writing. They brought words of encouragement, a shoulder to cry on, or a sandwich, maybe, but I always went back to the trenches by myself.

Alone in your story can feel like a scary place at times. Not always, certainly. But on the days when the words don't seem quite right, the questions can come. Is this any good? Does it even matter? Will this ever amount to anything?

When I was in my season of being alone as a writer—which lasted during my teens and first few years of my twenties—I thought that once I had writing friends, I wouldn't have those questions anymore. I imagined that I would have my arms linked with my fellow writers buds, and with their help, I would be secure in my stories.

And if writing friends didn't help make those questions go away, then surely having an agent or an editor would do the trick. How could a writer be insecure if they had that kind of partnership?

But as you likely know, especially if you've spent much time hanging around writing blogs, all writers have insecurities. Even your mostest favoritest writer in the whole world doubted a time or two when they wrote that great book.

As I've thought about how I deal with insecurity and pushing through times of doubt, I've been surprised to find that it isn't so much my writing community—as amazing and dear as they are to me—that sees me through, but rather lessons I learned during my season of being alone.

Here are several things I learned while doing this writing thing alone:

I learned to not need immediate gratification.

Writing and selling a novel is a long process. Honestly, there's not a lot of celebrating along the way. Just a lot of chipping away at a big project. Because I didn't have much of a choice, I grew used to working without anybody asking me to or without needing regular rewards.

I learned to spot and push through difficult places in my manuscript.

Because it was just me and my craft books, I had to figure out how to recognize when something in my manuscript wasn't working. Often this took a frustrating amount of time and distance. Then I would have to try and brainstorm the solution. These days I always choose to turn to critique partners for help, but there's still a lot of valuable in being able to spot problem areas and possible solutions in your own stories.

I wrote what I loved.

And I had no idea that it wasn't selling.

When I went to a conference in Florida—where I made my first writing friend, Erica Vetsch—I was at lunch when a writer asked me what I wrote. I told them, "Young adult fiction."

As I said this, a literary agent was just joining our table. He said, "Young adult fiction? Who's buying that?" He went on to tell how he had several clients with great YA books that he couldn't sell.

If I'd been paying attention to the market, I would have known that publishers weren't buying my type of YA books, and that they hadn't been for a few years. Because I didn't know this, I had several YA books written right as publishers decided they wanted to try reviving teen fiction. 

I developed my voice.

Because no one was reading my work or influencing it with suggestions of change, my writing voice had room to grow. I won't expand too much on this since I recently talked about how to develop your author's voice.

I learned how to be productive on my own.

Writing communities, blessings though they are, can be a serious distraction. (Last year several people gave up Go Teen Writers for lent, and while we missed having them around, I totally understood.)

I remember being at a conference where I overheard one writer say to another that she was guilty of "riding the conference high" from one conference to another without doing much writing in-between. 

In my alone season, I was never guilty of spending more time talking about writing than actually writing, because I had no one to talk about writing with. I spent my time writing or researching how to get published, and for a while, nothing else really entered the mix.

I have no desire to romanticize the time I spent alone. I was making a lot of mistakes that I didn't know about until I went to a writer's conference. When I finished a book, I had no other writers who could look at it critically and tell me that my main character was completely unsympathetic. Instead, I had to be told that by contest judges and the agent I pitched it to. My life is much happier, richer, and rewarding with my writing friends by my side.

I need my writing community, but I also needed my time of isolation to become who I am. And on a day-to-day basis, I still need to pull back from the community to spend my time alone with my story.

What's something about writing that you've learned either from writing on your own or from the writing community (including writing friends, blogs, podcasts, etc.)?