How Do I Stop Being a Lone Wolf?

Still searching for that elusive writing community

There’s one piece of advice often given to writers that never fails to make me squirm. It goes something like this: “You’ve got to find your community—it’s impossible to thrive in this industry without it. Luckily, the writing community is so welcoming and supportive. I don’t know what I’d do without my writer friends!”

It always makes me want to curl up in a ball and weep.

Every time I come across advice like this, I have the same intense reaction. After a while, I started wondering… why exactly does this bother me so much?

It’s not like it’s bad advice. Obviously, these writers have found a place where they feel they belong. And that’s great for them! But a great deal of my irritation, I think, was because I don’t really have a “writing community” to speak of.

And a lot of that is my own fault.

A rather weary-looking wolf. Photo by Federico Di Dio photography on Unsplash.

I know that I’m not doing all the things I should be doing. I rarely go to book signings or author talks or other literary events. I quiet-quit social media last year, which I never figured out how to use in a way that felt good for me. This has been great for my mental health in many ways, but I know I’m missing out on a lot of opportunities to be part of the community. In general, for the past year I have not been hustling or networking or trying to grow my audience. I knew there would be consequences to this, and I thought I was willing to accept them.

But the extreme irritation I feel when other writers gush about being part of such a “welcoming and supportive” community… well, that told me I apparently wasn’t as okay with it as I’d thought.

It’s more than just the guilt of not being a good-enough literary citizen, though. It’s the wounds I still carry from trying to participate in the writing world. Because there was a time when I’d been better about getting out there, going to writing classes and participating in workshops. Well, one online workshop. I went into the experience hoping it might help me make some of those elusive writer-friends, and spent a lot of time crafting thoughtful, constructive critiques of everyone’s work—only to have one of the other writers in the group take my feedback as a personal affront and lash out at my piece in return, starting their critique with, “The problem with this is…” and continuing with a long rant about all of its shortcomings. 

That was not exactly an isolated incident. There have been various times where I’ve reached out to other writers and did not find the camaraderie I desperately needed (and, frankly, expected, since I had been led to believe that the writing community is so welcoming and supportive!).

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of treasured people in my life who support me wholeheartedly, some of whom are fellow writers and book-lovers. (Shout out to artist/writer Gina Siciliano, who is the reason you can find my books at Lamplight in Pike Place Market, and who recently started an amazing Patreon!). I’ve had a few wonderful critique-partner relationships over the years. But on the whole, I’ve been left with the uncomfortable feeling that, despite the lip service being paid to the idea that “we’re all in this together and other writers will support you!”, we are all actually locked in unspoken competition with each other, fighting for the meager scraps doled out by the publishing industry.

I did feel a bit vindicated when I read Benjamin Schaefer’s piece “We Need to Talk About Competition,” which acknowledges that there’s something systemic going on here.

Scarcity mentality tells me there are only so many pieces of the proverbial pie and only the worthy get fed. It is a mentality that fuels the construct of competition, and when it comes to the profession of writing, it is likely the unfortunate byproduct of trying to create art in a capitalist society in which value is determined by limited opportunities for success. But knowing this doesn’t make the construct feel any less real—or any less difficult to navigate.

In short, the system pits us against each other, and this can show up in our relationships in various ways. Maybe I sensed this as I treaded through murky writer-waters, and subconsciously wondered if I actually wanted to hang out there after all. 

---

By the time I became a writer, I was already a bit of a lone wolf. During my school years, how many group projects did I end up finishing on my own because the rest of the group didn’t do their share of the work? More than I can even remember. “If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself” was a familiar mantra. 

So when I made the decision to independently publish my books, it felt like a natural extension of the theme. Striking out on my own seemed like such an obvious choice. We (and by “we” I mean Americans, especially white Americans) have so, so many stories about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Struggling against the odds and emerging victorious. We have figureheads that we lift up, leaders we put on pedestals, biographies about specific individuals who have done great things. 

Individuals. That’s the key word. As if these paragons of success were so hard-working, so clever and resourceful, that they didn’t need anyone else. They lone-wolfed their way into the annals of history. 

Individualism is so entrenched in American society that it’s just seen as the natural way of things. It’s what makes us “know” that if we didn’t succeed, we just didn’t work hard enough. It’s what makes me write, “It’s my own fault that I can’t find community.” Even Schaefer’s quote above, which acknowledges the difficulties of making art in a capitalist world, refers to the scarcity mindset, which implies that if someone can just reject the notion of scarcity inside their own mind, the problem will be solved. While this can certainly reduce suffering, it doesn’t fix the deeper issues. Because scarcity is more than just a mindset; it’s essential to the functioning of capitalism, and as such, it’s deeply embedded into our daily lives and is constantly being reinforced in very real ways.

But if we acknowledge that the underlying, systemic issue is largely out of our control, that begs the question: is there anything can we do about it? 

---

When I drill down far enough, what underlies my discomfort when people talk about their great supportive writer communities is that I want to belong somewhere. To find other people with whom I am truly seen and understood. 

While there are certain aspects of my life where I do feel this belonging, it’s definitely lacking from my writing life. Or is it? Sometimes I wonder if my perception of lack is due to my mental picture of what a writing community looks like: a cohesive group of writers who have a shared experience in common, whether that is having the same agent/publisher, going through the same MFA program or writing residency, or participating in the same online/social media forum.

But what if it can look all sorts of different ways? What if I don’t have to put the writing community in one box and the food justice community in another and the witchy community in yet another—what if I can build relationships and draw strength from all of these places, and even intermingle them? Also: what if it’s okay for a community to be small? What if it it’s less about growing the number of connections, and more about deepening those that already exist?

Any way you slice it, though, relationship-building takes time. My preferred methods—strolling through gardens and forests; enjoying leisurely meals together; writing long rambling letters/emails where both of us can confess how we really feel and talk about how things are really going instead of feeling obligated to put a positive spin on things—are best suited to one-on-one relationships, and often seem antithetical to the pace and pressures of life in the 2020s. To save myself and others the “trouble,” it often feels so much easier, and safer, to remain a lone wolf (especially for this socially anxious introvert).

Yet I’m trying to live by my values. And I reject the myth that we are separated from each other and from nature as a whole. I value not just knowing that “we are all connected” but also actually feeling our interconnectedness. There’s a bridge between knowing and feeling that feels pretty insurmountable at times, though. So here I am saying, “individualism is bad, but through my constant lone-wolfing I’m totally buying into and reinforcing that narrative, and I don’t like that I’m part of the problem but I also don’t know how to stop.”

You know who else rejects the lone wolf mentality, though? Wolves, who in fact are very social pack animals. So, even the language I use to describe my individualistic tendencies invokes a view of nature that does not actually exist!

Three white wolves chilling around a stone “table.” Photo by Thomas Bonometti on Unsplash.

Sometimes, I can convince myself that, merely by being a writer and by participating in the ways I’ve been able to, I already am part of the writer community, even if it doesn’t always look the way I expected it to. Sometimes I can remember that I do an okay job of showing up for people I care about, and supporting other writers in my own ways. That this very newsletter is its own community of sorts, and that I can attempt to shape it into the welcoming, supportive space that I always wanted. 

But most of the time? I’m a bit… lonely. And weary. Because I’m much more likely to feel the draining of my energy as I try to connect with others than I am to feel any warm fuzzies in return. Maybe it’s because of that negativity bias we all have, the tendency to give more weight to discomfort and pain than to pleasant emotions. Sometimes, though, it feels like something is blocking that reciprocal flow of energy. And I’ve been wondering if this blockage—the inability to receive the good stuff, to truly let in the things I know will nourish me—is a symptom of living in an “every man for himself” kind of world.

Even if I haven’t exactly figured out how to resolve all of this, I do have some thoughts! But I’ll save those for next time. Until then, thanks for being part of—yes, I’ll say it!—this community.