In The Company of Strangers

In the past two years I've taken eight online writing courses. I've spent thousands of dollars. I've written a dozen essays and three-quarters of a novel.

And I've made friends. Most of whom I've never met.

Not sure that means I paid for my friendships or if they were a perk of my writing habit.

I'm going with the latter.

Does your circle of friends include writers? Do you feel the need to know writers? Where do your connections come from -- a library? A writing group? The internet?

I need to connect with writers. Daily. And since I don't know any IRL (in real life) the world wide web has afforded me the opportunity to develop not only friends but to gain teachers and mentors who have impacted my life.

Writing used to be a solitary lifestyle. I am often alone in my house, on my chair, behind by desk, staring at my laptop monitor. But I a rarely without the ability to connect with another writer. Email, blogs, websites, classes. Feedback or not, talking words, grammar, sentence structure, plot, dialogue or the weather. Doesn't matter.

What matters -- is that writing matters to us.

Where did you meet your writer-friends?

Hard at work or hardly working?

"What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.”
-- Burton Rascoe

I spend a lot of time thinking. I jot down ideas. I talk into my cell phone and leave myself messages. My ideas come from the strangest places and I have to record them someway, somehow or they go back where they came from.

I'm always working. I'm always writing even when I'm not. Everyone is a character and every place is a scene. Every chat is potential dialogue. Not to make everyone in my life paranoid, but my best ideas come from the worst things you say or do.

I also read a lot. And with every word my eyes transfer to my brain, I'm thinking about the story and the writing.

What do you do when you're "not working" that is really an essential part of your writing process?