Once upon a time, there was a highly intelligent, gifted young writer who lived in a far away land and didn’t have any writing friends.
She had friends who thought it was cool that she wrote. She had friends who enjoyed reading some of what she wrote. She had friends who told her she was pretty good. But she didn’t have any other writers to share her work with.
None of her friends knew about having a mind full of characters who talked to her all the time. None of her friends really understood what she meant when she mentioned her troubles with POV. Her frantic scribbles on restaurant napkins earned her the name “eccentric.”
Still, though she sometimes felt sad and sometimes abandoned her writing for months on end, she never gave up hope that sometime in the future, somewhere in the big Out There, she would meet other writers who would get it.
Then, one day, she moved from the far away land to another land. And there, after only a little bit of keeping her ear to the ground, she met a tribe of writers: outwardly rational creatures who knew how to nod in the right places and which salad fork to use…but who harbored within a flashing, untameable streak that called them to brave the wilds and fight their way to the edge of the pool and drink deep, drink from the Source, and then pour out that creative energy into making stories the world had not yet read.
In other words, they were creatures like herself.
She fell in love with them, and they fell in love with her, and they talked about plot development together and about what happens when characters don’t do what one wants them to. With her new tribe, the young writer embarked upon a quest to solve the world’s problems through many hours of philosophical discussion and to find exactly the right way to make a glass of American iced tea. They huddled in circles over coffee and late-night breakfasts and scrawled their desperate words with the frenetic energy of addicts inhaling lines of coke.
The young writer had found her Narnians, and they were more cramazing than she had ever hoped.
Her craft had never been more glorious. And within her tribe, she was home.
(If you don’t have a writing group, you need to find one. You’ll be happier. I promise. So go find them — your tribe needs you. And that’s WILAWriTWe.)
Photo credit Julie V. Photography.
