Is writing really a lonely job?

Everyone says that being a writer is the loneliest job there is. I’ve heard it said that writers are quiet people who struggle to deal with social interaction because they never have to deal with it. They’re introverts, hermits, people who stay cooped up in their studies for months at a time working on their next novel.

I think this view of writers is completely unjustified. I’m sure there are some writers who become hermits until their next project is finished. But, for me, writing is a collaboration, a conversation.  

Firstly, you come up with the idea for your next story. They say there are no original ideas and it’s true to some extent. Every idea you have is an appropriation of something you’ve read or seen. Right there, you have the start of a collaboration.

Then you share your idea with a friend. And they talk back, often with ideas of their own. Especially if they are themselves a writer. This starts a conversation. A conversation that helps to develop your idea into something more substantial in ways you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.

Then you start to write the thing itself. It’s influenced by everything going on around you. And if you stay cooped up in one room for the whole time that you’re writing it, there’s not going to be much to influence you, is there?

And then you get to the editing stage. If you’re like me, you send your story around to your friends and family and ask for feedback. Some friends will help you with your grammar and sentence structure. Others will tell you what their opinions on the characters are, how they perceived the story, how they understood what happened.

More often than not, their perceptions are going to be completely different to what you had intended when writing it and what you, yourself, see when you read your own work. But your editors’ perceptions will undoubtedly influence your second draft. You’ll start to see your characters in new lights and that will change how you re-write them in the next draft.

And then, finally, if you’re lucky enough, people read your story. And, just like your editors, they will interpret it in their own ways and link it back to their own lives in ways only they could. I don’t want to evoke Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ here because I don’t entirely agree with it, but to some extent it is true. Maybe you’ll meet your readers and find out how they read your story, what they got from it. And that is just the beginning of a whole new conversation.

So, no, I don’t believe writing is a lonely job. Not unless you decide to be that stereotypical isolated writer holed up in his hermitage. If you want it to be, writing can be one of the most interactive and exciting activities there is.

Thanks for reading.