My cat went missing a day before I arrived in London. The first week I was here, I spent almost all my time putting up posters in the local park, emailing rescue organizations, visiting the local vets and pet shops, and knocking on neighbours’ doors. Not to mention walking down random streets calling out the cat’s name.
Even by British standards, we’ve moved into an extremely family and animal-friendly area, but I have to admit, I was utterly shocked by how much people went out of their way to help us.
When our posters started falling off the trees in the park, random people stuck them to benches or notice boards. When the people at the hardware store found out that the reason I was buying nails was for a lost cat poster, they refused to take my money. People called us when they thought they might have seen our cat. Rescue organizations shared our cat’s picture on their Facebook pages and sent me long emails with detailed advice on how to conduct the search.
Honestly, there were days when it felt like there were people looking out for us, people who cared deeply about bringing our cat back. (“It’s a cat,” I said to my husband. “How can people care so much?” “We’re a nation of animal lovers,” he replied.)
It is sometimes difficult to explain to people who don’t have pets how upsetting losing a pet can be and why we overreact the way we do, but fellow animal lovers get it instinctively. If I see a lost cat, I’m much more likely now to search for its owner than I ever was before I’d had pets of my own. I’m more likely to know whether it’s actually lost or simply having a wander.
You can probably see where this is going. Writers, like animal lovers, are a large but unique group and it is hard for non-writers to understand why we behave the way we do sometimes. To an outsider, it seems irrational that you’d celebrate getting a rejection from The New Yorker, but you would, wouldn’t you? Most non-writers will not understand why you’re feeling deflated instead of excited on finishing the first draft of your novel, why you sleep with a notebook under your pillow, why you get pissed off when you’re typing and someone interrupts your train of thought to talk to you. Most non-writers will not understand how playing Tetris is actually helping you think.
Some of us live with fellow writers who instinctively get it and therefore, leave us alone to do our thing, but many of us don’t. And this is where community comes in. It’s important to have a support group of people who make you feel there’s someone looking out for you, someone who cares deeply about whether or not you finish your novel, sell your screenplay, or make that six-figure freelance income.
I’ve been terrible at building my writing community over the last few years. I could come up with a million excuses, but the truth is that like most writers, I’m just not very good at it. I’d rather curl up with a good book than go to a networking event, prefer email over picking up the phone, like to ask friends for opinions instead of joining a real life writing group. But you know what? This hurts my career and it hurts my mental health. We all need writing friends, people we can rely on to offer help, advice, contacts, and moral support and the bigger our community, the more we benefit. When we limit our outreach, it becomes easy to feel like we’re weathering the writing storms alone, like there’s no one who’s ever been there and no one who ever will be. We have all experienced the isolation that comes with being a writer, even though there is an easy cure for it, a solution right at our fingertips.
What’s more, when you become part of a community, you start tapping into what I like to think of as serendipity, but is actually just a result of being top of mind. A friend of mine just bagged a really high-paying client. After years of being a recluse, she finally got on the networking bandwagon and started asking people out to coffee. She didn’t really expect much to come of it and while she’s been looking for better and higher-paying clients, she hadn’t outright mentioned it to anyone. Then, one day over drinks, she did to one person. And it turned out that this person she’d had coffee with six weeks ago knew an editor who was hiring, he passed on her information, and suddenly she had a new client. They didn’t even ask for her samples, that one recommendation was enough.
Sometimes, as has happened to me, you hear from an editor who wants to hire you because they’ve found you through a freelancer they love, a freelancer you helped out years ago and completely forgot about. That freelancer, on the other hand, didn’t forget your generosity and wanted to pass it forward. And so now, when you least expect it, you have someone who wants to give you work. You could think of it as luck or chance, but I like to think of it as being part of a community. You help each other without expectation of reward and when you gain from someone’s generosity, you make it a point to pass it forward.
Last week, after 23 days of being missing, my cat was finally found. He’d shown up dirty and malnourished at an apartment block four miles from where we live and a kind man had taken it upon himself to nurture him back to health and figure out where he’d come from. For two weeks, this guy fed our cat and waited for an opportunity to catch hold of him. Finally, one morning, after trying for four hours, he was able to get the cat into a box and have him scanned for a microchip at the local vets, which is when they contacted us. I’m not going to be able to repay this (amazing) man’s generosity in kind, but I have in turn helped two different animal charities in ways that I could. We’re all part of the community, we all benefit. We all pay it forward.
Building a community doesn’t have to be a difficult thing. And you don’t have to do it all at once. It takes just one email, just one meeting, one connection. One act of passing it forward.
It’s time to start rebuilding my writing community and if you haven’t done it already, it’s time to start building yours.
I’m going to invite someone out for coffee today. Are you?