No one does anything alone in this world. It takes collaboration, support, and community to make anything happen.
That’s why I get so frustrated with the endless perpetuation of the myth of the solitary author.
You know what I am talking about: the writer who goes out into the woods alone with nothing but a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey, and then, months later, returns from their cabin of solitude with a masterpiece of a manuscript underneath their arm, ready for publication.
As lovely a story as that sounds, it’s not how books are made.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, we debunk the myth of the solitary author and talk about how the most successful authors of the last 150 year were all part of a community of creatives.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #145 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #145 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin t John’s here.
I hosted a webinar last night. Those are always fun. I love live training. I mean, via my group work, that’s a lot of what I do. I teach through audio, teach through video, and then do live workshops and sessions and all of that. That is always fun.
Something I mentioned on that training last night was that the doors to my group coaching program FIRST DRAFT are now open for this week only. This is the last week of October 2022, and now is the time to get signed up. If you want to be part of first draft to get information on the program, just head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/first draft.
Now, unfortunately for me these days, podcasting is largely a solitary practice.
I did many years of interviews, and that was always pleasurable, but as my schedule has just filled up so tight, it became more and more difficult to get interviews scheduled between all my coaching calls. And before I was doing interviews, I actually co-hosted a podcast with another author, Katherine Brunelle. And that show was called Right Along Radio. And before that, we had one called Ottawa Rights. And as fun as it is to do the Ready Coach podcast and to share information with all of you, it was really fun collaborating with Catherine on the two shows that we did together.
There’s something about collaboration that is so fun, so pleasurable, and really fills you up in a way that solitary work alone doesn’t. And that is why it bothers me so much when I see people perpetuating this myth of the solitary writer, this idea that the only way you can write a book is to rent a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and go in there with like a bottle of whiskey, a typewriter, and a pack of cigarettes, and pound out your masterpiece alone before you finish it, and then bring it back to civilization.
This is not the way we always thought of writers. There was a time where writing was seen as a vocation. It was seen as a job. And as with most jobs, you don’t do many jobs alone. In those days, people had what was called a patron, a patron with someone who paid the author to write. You might be familiar now with the platform Patreon. Well, that’s where the whole idea of Patreon as a title comes from. It comes from this long history of writers getting paid to create their art.
Now, what happened in the 19th century was the emergence of the romantic poets, and as a bit of kind of clever author branding, the romantic poets created this idea that has lasted now over a hundred years. And the idea is really what we continue to think of as the artist, our conception of the artist as this lone person who perhaps goes for a walk along the lake or into the hills and is inspired by nature and who pours their heart out via their writing. In this kind of solitary relationship with nature, all of this really was created by the romantic poets. People like William Wordsworth.
The Romantics
And as I said, this may or may have not been true about how Wordsworth created his great poetry. But what we do know about Wordsworth and what is true about how he created his art was that he was not a loner by any sense. In fact, he was in a close creative relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You might know him as the author of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. You might have had to read that in high school, perhaps. So Wordsworth, who we get this concept of the artist from the lone artist, was in fact working really closely with another author. And it is said that they not only spoke to one another about writing collaborated, but they also pushed each other. They, they were competitors as friends and colleagues. They also saw themselves as competitors and pushed each other to do better and better work.
And Wordsworth and Coleridge weren’t outliers. In fact, I would say many of the most successful authors of the last 150 years worked as part of a creative community.
Following up a generation after Wordsworth and Coleridge, the original romantics, were what some people call the New Romantics.
The New Romantics
This was a group that included Percy Shelley, his wife, Mary Shellye, their friend, Lord Byron. In fact, the story Frankenstein, a book you all know, a story that continues to be told again and again today was written or began as a ghost story challenge that Byron, Shelly, and Mary Shelly had one weekend where they were away at a cottage and there was bad weather, and they were stuck inside. And they said, “Well, let’s each write a ghost story. A scary story.”
Percy Shelley’s story didn’t really go anywhere. Byron’s didn’t go anywhere. But Mary Shelley’s story that she started that weekend, that cottage weekend, was the story of Frankenstein, which some people say is one of the first pieces of science fiction ever written. So if Shelley and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron weren’t hanging out together, weren’t friends, weren’t stuck together in a cottage over a rainy weekend, we might never have Frankenstein.
We might also, speaking of science fiction, we might also not have Han Solo. Lord Byron is basically the archetype for the Han Solo character. They described Lord Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The kind of charming rogue scoundrel that we saw was characterized via Han Solo in the Star Wars movies.
Star Wars being Sci-fi, a genre that, you know, Mary Shelley pioneered because she was part of a writing community.
The Inklings
Perhaps one of the more famous writing communities are the inklings at Oxford University. This was the group that CS Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, and JRR Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, were part of Those two men, along with other academics, got together on a regular basis. And they spoke about literature, they spoke about writing, they spoke about fairy tales, and of course, they spoke about fantasy fiction.
Narnia did not spring out of nowhere, out of Lewis’s solitary mind. Nor did Lord of the Rings. Those brilliant artists were creating those incredible fantasy worlds in collaboration with one another, speaking to one another, bouncing ideas off one another, critiquing each other’s work, pushing each other to do better and better.
The Modernists
Some of my favorite writers are the modernists. I love Virginia Wolf. You’ve probably heard me gush about her before. Well, early in her career, Virginia Wolf reached out to EM Forrester, another successful British author at the time, and the two of them had almost a mentorship relationship where Forrester was helping her out, encouraging her. And of course, her husband was her publisher, <laugh>. So again, talk about a writer community . . . it was right there in the family. They were creating Virginia Wolf’s books together.
The Lost Generation
Also, part of that modernist movement is The Lost Generation. These are the expatriate American writers who moved to Paris after World War I and who were hanging out in Gertrude Stein’s Paris Saloons, which is kind of like a fancy word for getting together to party and get drunk and talking about writing.
That’s where you would find folks like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and TS Elliott. All of these incredible writers knew each other. They didn’t just know each other, they hung out together, got drunk together, and critiqued each other’s work. They were a community, and they were perhaps an extra close community because they were all Americans living in another country, living in France, living in Paris.
The Beats
Another group of writers that I love are the beat writers, you know, largely led by Jack Kerouac, but included in that group is Alan Ginsburg, the poet. We’ve got William S Burrows. Again, a community, people who all knew each other.
And I mean, my favourite musician, my favourite songwriter of all time is Bob Dylan. Who do you think Bob Dylan was hanging out with in the sixties? Ginsburg, of course. So, you know, after Kerouac was gone and the the Beat movement was kind of over. The Beat movement grew into the early folk movement and as well as the jazz movement, obviously that it was inspired by.
But the point being, Dylan knew Ginsburg. Ginsburg knew Kerouac. Kirouac knew Boroughs. These people were working together as a community of writers and creatives.
Palahnuik’s Writing Group
Even today, massively successful authors like say Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame are part of groups and communities. In the comic book sequel to his debut novel Fight Club, we actually see a fictionalized version of Chuck Palahniuk at his writer’s group reading pages to his community of authors.
As you can see, looking back over the last 150 years of literature, some of the greatest authors, the most successful writers, were part of communities. They worked with other writers. They were not some lone individual who stumbled off away from civilization into the woods and wrote their book alone. They worked with other writers. And that is one of the reasons why, in addition to being a one-on-one writing coach, I run group coaching programs.
First Draft Group Coaching
Building writer communities is a passion of mine. And bringing together groups of people who care about writing, who care about improving their craft and who care about supporting each other in a purely positive way is really important to me.
That’s what FIRST DRAFT is all about. That’s the group coaching program whose doors are open for this week as I mentioned at the top of the episode.
This is a group program. It’s been running for a year. We have an amazing, incredible group of writers in there already making huge progress on their novels, improving their craft, and supporting one another. And I’m so excited to bring new folks in, to invite folks like you to come be part of our writing community.
You know, the Inklings are gone. The Beat Poets have mostly passed. The romantic poets were a century ago.
This is now.
This is your chance to find other artists and writers and creatives to connect with.
And there’s people from all over the spectrum in terms of experience in this group; in terms of life experience, career experience, writing experience, and it’s just such an amazing community to support your writing goals. So if you are wanting to get a first draft of a book finished in the next six months or less, now is the time to join FIRST DRAFT.
This isn’t some NaNoWriMo thing. National Novel Writing Month starts in a week’s time. I’m at a point in my life where I’m not gonna support that type of craziness. If you want to sit down and write a book in one month’s time, hey, all power to you. Go work on National Novel Writing Month in a week’s time. But who I’m interested in working with are people who have families or have careers, or who are perhaps retired and dealing with health issues. There’s a lot of life going on that cannot be just put on hold to get a book written. So come join my community and work on your book at a reasonable pace.
I’ve worked with hundreds of authors over the last decade, and I would say six months is a perfectly reasonably paced timeframe to write a first draft of a book in while also still having time to do your job, do the dishes, do the laundry, spend time with your family, all the things that life demands of us.
FIRST DRAFT is open.
Now head on over to https://www.kevintjohns.com/firstdraft/. There’s a long webpage there with tons of information about the program. You can learn all about, not just the community aspect, but the coaching aspect, the training resource aspect. All the different incredible things that I have going on within FIRST DRAFT are listed out there on the page.
Go check it out now.
Take action now because there’s an amazing community of writers waiting for you inside a FIRST DRAFT.
That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
