The Importance of Your Writing Community – More Lessons from the Hunger Games, Catching Fire

It was just last night while reading some of the final letters of Flannery O’Connor (so sad to think about, that we see the end is coming and she keeps saying “I’m in no hurry to publish, I’ve got plenty of time…” and contemplating the Hunger Games (specifically, Catching Fire) that I was thinking about the importance of writing community to, yes, our survival in a (sometimes) cold and barren landscape of writing. (My first post, in case you are interested, on writing and lessons from The Hunger Games can be found here.)

Katniss’s support system – including her fellow players, her stylist, and her love interests – all play a key part in helping Katniss become a hero and surviving a set of games designed specifically to destroy her. Cinna’s magic wedding-dress-becoming-a-mockingjay represents a fantastic PR move that Katniss probably would never have thought of on her own, making her a rebel icon. Everyone in the Catching Fire games was trying to help Katniss, though often she didn’t recognize or appreciate the help she was getting, and didn’t actually like or trust at least half of the people helping her. Katniss becoming a hero to the masses was actually orchestrated by a group of people she didn’t even know behind the scenes. Isn’t that the way it is with writing success as well? If we’re going to succeed as writers, we need help from beyond our own small minds and reach – friends who watch out for us, critics who champion us, publishers who back our work – a network that will catch us when we fall, when we fail,  when we flame out. Like it or not, though writing may seem like the quintessential loner’s quest, it is actually quite often an activity that requires building and hanging onto a community in order to succeed.

Flannery O’Connor’s gigantic amount of correspondence with other writers represented her 1. isolation in a small town in Georgia where she remained often due to her lupus 2. her desire to reach out and communicate with the writing world despite that isolation. Her shares her good news and her struggles, her grumpy reactions to her reviews, her uncertainty about aspects of her work. She argues with people, encourages them, and keeps strenuously in touch with writers living thousands of miles away. She reviews and recommends books, offers congratulations, sends gifts. In this web of correspondence, we see her efforts to stay connected.

The writer’s life involves a lot of plain old rejection, being turned down for jobs and grants in ways that seem intensely personally hurtful, and those rare moments of celebrating good news – which are always less fun celebrating alone, or with people who don’t understand why an acceptance from one magazine is more exciting than an acceptance from another. It is important for us to reach out to other writers in our community – whether it’s meeting for coffee, favoriting a tweet, or reviewing a book of a writer we’ve never met but admire the work of. It’s important for us, like Katniss, to get over ourselves and maybe our personal prejudices and see that we are all in this together, that survival is only certain if we accept the help from those around us.

So go ahead – plan a meeting, a party, a get-together. Make a phone call, send an e-mail. Let others know how you are doing, or what you might need. Let them know you’ll support them too. Someday soon, you never know, you might need to be helicoptered to safety, and the people willing to do it might be around you right now, waiting for the signal.