How Does a Writer Build Community?

"The best/worst advice I’ve heard over and over is to 'find your writing community.'”

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Until a piece is accepted for publication, writing is blissfully and cursedly solitary work. There’s no one to tell me if I’m on the right track or help me through a sticking point. There are some things I’m forced to trust myself on, wait for the connection to be made in my brain, the click to occur.

There are other things having a writing community can help with: questions about best practices in submitting to lit mags, event meetups, knowing someone who understands staring out the window is a part of the process, an interruption of “just a minute” can derail my work for the entire day, that I don’t understand how the words I force can be just as good (or bad) as the words that flow, how I feel completely out of control in a process that I’m the only one in control of.

When I started writing, I was thrilled with the solitariness; I still am. But occasionally, I want someone to tell me they too have moments where they feel they’re spinning their wheels, an entire day doing social media because they can’t face their manuscript. Someone to agree that these temporary distractions from work are just that: temporary, and oddly essential to the process. We don’t always recognize when our subconscious is working through something our conscious can’t see yet. Someone to commiserate with over the insanely different requirements for every submission, to wallow with me in each rejection, to cheer with me and dance about with each acceptance. Sometimes I want someone to say, “oh yeah, they’ve never accepted anything I’ve sent them either,” when talking about my dream lit mag (looking at you Kenyon Review).

The best/worst advice I’ve heard over and over is to “find your writing community.” It’s the best advice because community is essential, the worst advice because how does one begin to do that? Every time I read this advice somewhere it’s followed by the suggestion to take a workshop or go on a retreat. And while I love workshops and retreats, while I agree they can be amazingly beneficial, there aren’t that many writers who have the necessary resources: the ability to take time off from school, work, and family, not to mention the money to apply, the funds to travel (especially when submitting seems cheap until you add up all those three-dollar-plus fees at the end of the month).

So how does one build their writing community for free and from the comfort of their own home, hidden behind their computer screen in introverted writerly bliss?

In an effort to build my writing community I turned to Google, searching for authors in my state and creating a spreadsheet of their details: names, emails, websites, which lit mags they mentioned being published in. And then I contacted them either via their website contact form or an email—like a literary stalker, the internet Annie Wilkes.

I kept the email brief: a greeting by name, a statement that I am also a writer in their state, I look forward to reading their forthcoming publication(s), I hope we’ll meet in person someday, and closed with contact info.

My email wasn’t fantastic. It was audacious and perhaps a bit poorly thought out. I should have maybe waited until after reading their work to contact them so I could say something complimentary and/or specific that I enjoyed, maybe praised them for getting accepted by a lit mag that’s on my dream list (CutBank anyone?).

Did I really expect to hear back from any of them? Yes and no. I figured I’d count myself lucky if I heard back from two out of twenty. And while I didn’t hear back from all of them, and one person admitted later they thought I was a scammer, I did hear from more than half of them. I even got a few invitations to coffee, lunch, to meet in person at a workshop they were attending.

Should everyone reading this rush out and email the authors in their state? Probably not. It depends on where you live. I happen to live in Montana, a place where people know their neighbors by name and flick a wave to one another when passing in the street, sometimes slowing down to hang out the driver’s side windows and chat. Perhaps in another state it wouldn’t work. In a city though, maybe. If you’ve been published in the same lit mag, certainly.

I suspect I heard from as many writers as I did, and received such lovely responses, because I undertook the exercise from a genuine and vulnerable place. I wasn’t trying to further my career, ask for blurbs, get them to read my stuff, or ask if they could get me into the lit mags they’d been published in. Instead, what I sought was simple and straightforward: community.

Pick and choose how you want to proceed: I could have reached out to any writers, not just in my state - Go big or go home, right? I could have reached out to Stephen King! But that would have felt disingenuous. As a teenager obsessed with everything he wrote? Genuine. As an adult who no longer reads horror? Fake.

If you’d like to grow your own community and sending emails makes you squeamish, consider becoming a reader for a lit mag. There are calls for readers all the time and it’s a prestigious way to give back to the writing community while expanding your personal writing knowledge, too. I’ve just been accepted as a reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly and I’m looking forward to the experience, to learning what happens behind the scenes, to getting a clearer understanding of why things get rejected and accepted, to adding up-and-coming writers acting as readers to my list.

Perhaps also consider joining a challenge like #1000WordsOfSummer, #100RejectionsChallenge, or (since I mentioned him earlier) #StephenKingWritingChallenge. It’s surprising how many writers you can “meet” by using writer hashtags. When I took on the #100RejectionsChallenge it was transformative for unexpected reasons, mostly the people I met by doing it (but that’s another post).

Since I started my community building project, I’ve joined The Author’s Guild and scrolled the member profiles for the ones in my state, adding to my spreadsheet, sending emails. I joined a local writing group, adding to my spreadsheet, sending more emails. I joined AWP and searched their member directory, etc. Anytime I read a book I love, I add the author to my spreadsheet and follow them on social media and review their book on The StoryGraph and post a pic of their book cover on all my socials. I troll the internet for the lit mags they’ve been published in and add the journals’ names to my list of dream publications.

Whatever you do, if you’re looking for community, the best time to proceed is now. Decide what you want to do and do it. Follow writers on Threads. Follow agencies on Facebook. Follow publishers on Instagram. Follow lit mags everywhere, and more than that, interact with them. It’s not enough to hit the “like” button, leave comments and share their posts. Search for writing groups in your area or that meet online. If there’s nothing that works for you, create what you want to see. Lead the group you wish you could join.

Do something to ensure you have a community when you need one and to be there for others when they need one. Even if they’re strangers now, they won’t be forever, unless you give up on your dream…and having a network may ensure you follow it instead.

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