On building community (or how I made writing friends)

My previous blog post ‘How I got my agent'’ included a not-so-subtle call out to my writing group – Hopefully Writing. But vaguely alluding to my community didn’t feel like doing it, or the importance of finding your people in publishing, justice. So, for this month’s post, I wanted to take some time to properly share how overcoming my fear of meeting *strangers on the internet* (I bet that’s all you need to know to figure out I’m a millennial) turned out to be the best thing to come out of the year of our Lord 2020.

I guess that means it’s story time. Again. This one, I promise, is a lot more upbeat than my querying experience. In fact, I’m certain that without my Hopefully Writing crew I wouldn’t have survived the trenches for as long as I did. And I do mean survive, because the trenches are brutal and it does feel like you’re losing the will to live a little bit with every rejection or CNR.

Anyway. Community. People. My people. How did I find them?

Let’s throwback to baby writer Carla, circa end of 2019. I was active on Twitter by then, doing my research about agents and learning about publishing in general. And, shock of all shocks—there were authors out there who had friends. Like, friends friends. There were groups of people who read each other’s manuscripts, shared feedback, gushed about them. They had phone numbers! There were screenshots of unhinged conversations over DMs and inside jokes and just so much freaking love for each other’s craft and words and characters. It was the dream.

I had discovered that there were close writing friends. Groups. Communities. Cliques, some call them.

I wanted to be part of that so badly I experienced a minor episode of teen angst (even though I was a grown ass adult woman). I wanted to have cool writing friends almost as bad as I wanted an agent. But unlike the agent bit, which sucked but I knew what I had to do, I had no idea how one went about the writing friends part. Was there a secret formula I simply didn’t know? Was there a place I should be? How did I fit in? Why was I the one having lunch in the bathroom stall alone? How did I find my table?

It turns out all I had to do was try. And because I’m nothing if not obsessed with plans and backups and backups for the backups, I tried quite a few different things. I came across an author on Twitter talking about wanting to give back and starting a community. Sign me up baby! There I was, first in line, bouncing on the balls of my virtual feet. Someone else opened up a discord server for querying writers. Did I know what Discord was? No. Did it matter? Also no. I joined it, too. And then another. I also did a few writing Q&A things on Twitter but since they were run out of the US and I live in Europe, it was quite tough to keep up.

For a while, I was just experimenting. Exploring. Meeting people and having conversations and just wondering when it was going to click. With many of these folks, I simply didn’t. And that’s okay. This is important: not everyone fits with everyone. That’s normal. It’s how it should be.

With a few others, I did click (shoutout to Sami E. for being the best Cohort leader ever and letting me jump in her DMs to rant about querying without warning). And to Nicole W., one of my CPs, whom I met on Twitter. No servers, no chats. Just good old Tweets and DMs.

But I still didn’t have that group. That coveted circle of people where you can just… be. And talk about anything. And laugh and also cry because publishing is hard and tears are quite cathartic. So I kept trying.

And then, in one of those original huge servers I’d joined, someone I’d never even spoken to before suggested a Pitch Wars prep group. I signed up, of course.

It changed my life.

The first group was relatively big. We were all treading a bit carefully, trying to get to know another. Everyone was nice, but at least I was a little wary. You don’t grow up being told about dangerous people lurking on the internet every single day to then go on to trust an avatar and pen name right off the bat. It just doesn’t happen.

But weeks went by, and then it was months. And slowly, very slowly, we began to open up and share more. A joke here. A meme there. A book that had made us cry or squeal.

We lost quite a few people along the way—folks who simply never logged into the server after it was set up, or who hung out with us for about a week at the start and then disappeared, never to be active again—but a small, core group of us stayed.

We talked and found things we had in common. We worked on our manuscripts, and did sprints and accountability check-ins. We prepped for PW. We helped each other research mentors. We read some of each other’s work. And then we subbed to PW.

None of us got in.

And that, more than anything, made us bond. We knew we didn’t want to leave the server simply because the PW sub round was over. That might have been how it started, but it had grown to be so much more than that.

We were community, and none of us wanted to let go.

So, we moved to a much smaller server. We renamed our group so it wasn’t PW related. And we had our first Zoom call. And suddenly, we weren’t avatars and fake names anymore. We were actual people fighting for similar dreams and cheering each other on.

We became friends. Like, friends friends.

The real deal.

It’s been two years, and we’re still going strong. There are video calls, and PPT nights, and reading for each other. Random chats about books we love or don’t. Screeching about movies or TV shows. Spotify wrapped analysis and even job-search support.

It took a long time, and a lot of failed attempts, but I found my people.

I hope that this little tale encourages you to try. Because I’m sure your people are out there, somewhere. Y’all just haven’t found each other yet :)

Photo credit: Duy Pham