Building Your Best Community as a Writer
In a class, the instructor asked us to define “our communities.” That word, community, is one thrown around frequently in writerly circles, but this class exercise made me think more deeply about what it means. How community appears in my writing life. Where I might unconsciously take it for granted.
Community implies exchange. Generosity, the giving and receiving of something valuable. A circle of like-minded people, sometimes a circle of obligation. A place where we land and want to get along (or must get along), and care for each other. Attempt compassion, even when we aren’t inclined. People who matter.
I thought of my rural neighborhood, the people who matter to me there. I’ve known many of them for years, talk with them on my walks, give away bags of snap peas or romaine from my garden. My neighborhood also contains the few who don’t feel like my community, those of the nonstop barking dogs or the obsession with fireworks.
But with those who matter, I realized how much generosity keeping them in my circle requires. I need these neighbors and they need me. They keep an eye on our house when we’re away, get our mail. We do the same. When someone is sick, we bring food. Generosity is a kind of given.
It’s an unspoken agreement, one I haven’t always cared about in other places I’ve lived. Maybe it’s getting older, being settled for longer. I don’t necessarily crave isolation; I want to be in community.
Same with my writing. I write in isolation, but I am so aware of how much I need other writers.
But so often as a writing teacher, I get stories of unsatisfying communities—the not enough or too much critique groups, the few who grab all the time and attention in every meeting, the imbalance of participation and not. I’ve found it takes years to find and foster a strong writing community, one that helps you keep going, reach your goals, explore new ideas, keep your confidence. Along the way, there are the disappointments at not getting enough (or giving enough), the breakups of writer’s groups, the ones that don’t actually get off the ground.
Then I hear of a writer who has fostered an ideal writing community, who even has a book coming out because of that community’s support, and I wonder how this writer found, discovered, vetted, and sustained this literary neighborhood. What made her cohorts special enough to support her for the years it takes to create a book, to help her move from pages to published?
This week, I want to introduce you to one of my past students, Nigar Alam, whose debut novel comes out in August. I’ve asked Nigar to share some thoughts about the very special writing community she helped create, that in turn helped her birth this book.
Under the Tamarind Tree will be released on August 15 from Penguin Random House. It’s not Nigar’s first book—that one got her full effort for years and ended up being her “learning” project, the one in the drawer.
Not all writers stick with it after the little death of a project. Nigar attributes much of her ability to get back to writing a new book much faster, just a couple months after sending out queries for the first book, to the writing friends who were her very special writing community. The group of three was formed in one of the online classes she took from me at the Loft Literary Center, and they added a new member not long after. “All of us were working on debut novels,” Nigar says, “and one member published soon after we started meeting! We met around once a month to share feedback on 2000 words. We’d send each other the pages a few days before, then offer feedback turn-by-turn when we met.”
I find online writing classes an ideal place to meet (and vet) potential writer’s groups. After six to eight weeks of feedback, you get to know each writer’s style: how much do they give, how in-depth are their comments, does it feel like they really spent time with a piece, are they at a similar place in their project and publication experience, and (key, in my opinion) do they always open doors with their critique? For years, I watched interaction in the classes I attended, searching for potential members of my community. At the end of class, if I clicked with one or two of my classmates, I’d reach out via messaging and see if they wanted to exchange privately. Then we set up how we’d continue, what our meetings might look like.
Each meeting of Nigar’s writer’s group was slightly different, she says. Sometimes the writers asked specific questions in their pages, “like, is the purpose of the scene clear, or is the relationship between the characters coming through? Other times it was general feedback, pointing out where in the scene we were engaged and where we needed clarity or thought information was unnecessary,” Nigar told me.
One of the most important things she learned from her community was how to share her work with others and get helpful feedback. “Sharing my work was the single most difficult thing I’ve done,” she says, “but also the most beneficial.”
Eventually, her writing community expanded from the four members of her writer’s group into larger forums like CWOC (Crime Writers of Color) and WFWA (Women’s Fiction Writers Association), both “great organizations that provide support and knowledge about the publishing industry.” She decided to try something different with this second book: work on a query letter right from the beginning. “I entered competitions that required a query letter, synopsis, and sample pages, and it forced me to write and polish multiple versions very early in the writing process. I’d learned from my first book that a good query letter can provide direction during the story-discovery phase. So although my plotting wasn’t complete, my query letter and first pages were ready when I stumbled upon the Madeleine Milburn Mentorship—the weekend before its submission deadline.”
Nigar feels this huge turning point in her writing life came as a result of each community that encouraged her. Along with five other writers, she was selected for the mentorship in the summer of 2020 and the mentorship came with agent representation. “I was agented on the basis of 50 pages of an incomplete second book,” she says. “My agent saw the potential, and I couldn’t have gotten there without all my prior learning and experience.”
“Two things helped me get back to writing when my first book failed,” she says. “One, I love the process of writing. It’s a puzzle, magical too; I love putting word after word and seeing something come to life. My joy comes from the day-to-day writing process, and I wanted it back. Second, I had the best writing group. They helped me look ahead to a new story, a new book. They were gentle, but they offered great critique, and that’s how I ultimately settled on the idea for Under the Tamarind Tree.”
Under the Tamarind Tree is set in Karachi, Pakistan. The story toggles between present day and 1964 when main character, Rozeena, and her three childhood friends are on the precipice of adulthood, desperately holding onto secrets. “These secrets lead to a single night’s tragic events,” Nigar says, and that night changes the four friends’ lives forever.
In the book’s present-day story, Rozeena gets a telephone call from someone she hasn’t heard from in over fifty years, asking for a favor that might expose all the past secrets, destroying the life Rozeena has tried so hard to protect.
The story grew from Nigar’s desire to learn more about her parents’ childhood and their families’ struggles during and after Partition. “My father was eleven years old and my mother was one when their families fled their homes and crossed the border into Pakistan,” she says. “Partition happened in 1947, about twenty years before my book begins, but Rozeena and her friends would have been children at the time, just like my parents. I wanted to examine the effect of such a traumatic event on the lives of children and how the ripples continue long into their adult lives.”
The book asks the question: How far will we go to protect those we love?
(Scroll down to Shout Out! to preorder Nigar’s novel.)
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
Maybe you can attribute your writing success—or at least your growth and enthusiasm for your book project—to support and community. But maybe you also crave more connection.
I always ask myself, when I’m feeling the lack of community in any part of my life: how generous am I being?
One reason I love Substack is that generosity is the normal mode—just read the thread of comments on your favorite Substacks, especially those that have been around for a while, and you’ll see the support and encouragement. I find—and granted, I am new to this forum—that there’s less sense of the competition that breaks down artist communities. There’s more giving back.
The main reason I moved my weekly newsletter of fifteen years to Substack two months back was this potential for generous community. I wanted, I craved, a way to be in good-hearted, intelligent, creative conversation with others. Regularly. I subscribed to a number of Substack newsletters before I switched, trying to suss out the potential.
I’ve mentioned this before, but one of my favorite Substacks is George Saunders’s Story Club. Recently, George posed a question: What’s a relatively unheralded short story you love? So far, he’s gotten around 1500 comments, people chatting back and forth about stories that have changed their lives. Claire Keegan and Sherman Alexie commented. I love the generous community George has built; I hope to grow one of my own with this newsletter.
I try to always comment when I am sparked by a post, on George’s newsletters or anyone’s. A comment generates community. Others comment back, and the exchange happens.
But it all takes engagement, and many don’t have an ounce more of engagement bandwidth. Community has to become important before the priorities shift.
I learned this during the pandemic. Before 2020, I had a kind of passive but satisfying writerly community at my local coffee shop. Small town, non-generic, it featured rickety tables, a great barista, exotic teas, and lots of people like me writing alone but together. I took my laptop there every week once or twice, for a few hours. I never talked with anyone; there wasn’t a need. But it became a kind of home for my writing life. Until it closed.
Luckily, I had another valuable—and more active—community with one other person: my writing partner. I’ve written about her in other newsletters. We met in an online class a few years ago, only got together once in person, but our community of two sustained me during the writing of my soon-to-be-released novel. Her feedback is a huge part of my success with my books, I felt. And like Nigar, I attribute my ability to keep writing to our exchanges, even when the flow isn’t happening. As well as a writer’s group that emerged during those pandemic years, when I was desperate for community. Even after we all gradually came back into in-person meetings, I stayed with my virtual writer’s group of three other published writers. We’d worked hard to build what we had, and the generosity kept us all going.
If you have a generous writing group, a place to write with others, a way to exchange for feedback, consider yourself fortunate. But I’m often asked how does a writer find such a group, or upgrade their writing community if it’s not fulfilling their need? Here are some steps to consider, just to get started.
Take a class. My favorite way of finding community is to couple it with learning. I take online classes, because I live in the country and it’s easier to log on than fight traffic into the city. Plus, online the range of writers can be delightfully diverse. The best online classes I’ve taken are with Minneapolis’s The Loft Literary Center and Boston’s Grub Street. Look for on-demand (asynchronous) or live (on Zoom). I just completed an on-demand six-week class from Grub Street with instructor Caroline Belle Stewart. We had students from several countries, and the interaction, skillfully fostered by Caroline, was responsive, intelligent, and active. Feedback on the four stories I posted was incredibly helpful.
Classes often generate writer’s groups, which have already gone through the vetting process (how each person gives and receives feedback, what kind of writing they do, how experienced they are).
Attend a conference. Virtually or in person, writing conferences offer a plethora of events, workshops, panels, and other learning opportunities. I found them mostly about listening, less about interacting with others unless you are wired to reach out (I’m more of an introvert, so that’s not as easy for me). Many writers attend to find agents, spread the word about their new project, and network. If you want to start small, check out conferences in your city or state. AWP, the mother of all writing conferences, has an online search you can use to locate yours. And although quite a few of these have passed, here’s a comprehensive list of conferences for 2023 from Book Publicist.
Attend a writing retreat. Retreats are the opposite experience of conferences. They may include instruction but mostly it’s a chance to get away and immerse yourself in your art. (Writing residencies are even more so; they require application—but Electric Lit has a nice list for 2023 of low-cost or free ones.) One of my favorite venues for writing retreats is Madeline Island School of the Arts. I taught with them for twelve years and loved every minute of it. They have four locations around the U.S. and attract wonderful instructors. Great writer’s groups always came from the retreats I taught for MISA. And who wouldn’t benefit from serious time away from all demands?
Frequent local readings and workshops. Libraries, community centers, your local college, bookstores, and coffee shops are all venues to haunt if you want to meet other writers. Best of all, your new community will offer local, F2F meetings, and for many, that’s a positive. Look on bulletin boards online and in person for announcements and show up, test them out, see what you think. A close friend who is a singer/songwriter does this with Open Mics in his town and surrounds, and he’s made many musician friends this way. Also check out your state’s writing guilds, programs, and organizations. See what they offer and what you’d like to join to find your tribe.
Join a social media group or club for writers. I belong to quite a few Facebook and LinkedIn writing groups, enjoy the posts and responses, and get some cool links to follow for writing resources. One FB group I joined was all about rejection, and it boosted my confidence to keep submitting. I also recommend Substacks for this—the comments sections often gather like-minded writers and you can click on their name to message. One group I enjoy a lot is Becky Tuch’s Substack, Lit Mag News. It’s most geared towards writers who are submitting regularly or want to learn how, but her questions and prompts are great, and there’s often a lively discussion in the Comments below.
Join a professional writing organization. Nigar mentioned two professional groups she joined, which provided great ideas and forward momentum when she needed it. Writing schools like The Loft Literary Center and Grub Street offer useful resources to members and anyone taking classes.
Many more options out there; these might get you started, if you want to fill gaps in your writing community.
A final note: In Jane Friedman’s excellent newsletter, Electric Speed, she shared this quote by Jeff J. Lin:
“Much is made of genius & talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times—whether thru sheer determination, a strong support network or simply a lack of options.”
Where is that strong support network in your life?
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
For the weekly writing exercise today, I’m going to riff off a wonderful question recently posted by Becky Tuch of Lit Mag News.
If you are already in a writing community or have been in the past—a writer’s group, working with a writing partner, a feedback or critique group, a book club, or an ongoing workshop—share in the Comments (below) why it’s working for you. What is it like? Why is it important?
Feel free to share specifics that work, like how often you meet, what you exchange, whether you’re online or in person.
Easy to do this: just scroll down below Shout Out! Click on Comments. Add your voice. You’ll get my response and others’ responses too, I hope! It’s a fun way to practice generating community.
For extra fun, post a comment that addresses these questions:
What would your ideal writing community look like?
How would it change your writing life?