Now more than ever it’s time to support your community. It’s become clear that without active support, many of the communities we love and see ourselves as belonging to may wither and fade away. This is especially important for writers and other creators, whose communities are tenuous at the best of times.

How best to support your writing community?

Read, read, read. Read widely and deeply — and make an effort to read those writers who aren’t constantly in the spotlight. There are many fine writers whose works get overlooked because they are with smaller publishers that can’t afford a lot of marketing or who simply aren’t interested in self-promotion or social media. Go to the websites of smaller publishers in your country or writing/reading niche and see who they are publishing. You’d be surprised at how many writers you find who have fallen off your radar but you actually want to read. This is especially true if you live outside of the U.S. because, let’s face it, American publishing tends to dominate the cultural conversation. Hey, some of my favourite writers are American but I like a bit of variety!

Tell writers you like or appreciate their work. I can’t tell you how many times this has mattered to me when I’ve felt like giving up on a project and lighting my computer on fire. A well-timed social media post or email can mean the difference between a writer finishing their next work or not. We tend to work in isolation, after all, and the feedback we get tends to be spaced at very long and irregular intervals. Much like royalty payments! I can’t speak for other writers, but a generous comment here and there has meant as much to me as a positive review somewhere. I’ve even made some lasting friendships out of people reaching out to me!

Speaking of reviews, share the love for your favourite books. As fewer books are being reviewed in the media, personal recommendations matter more than ever. A review doesn’t have to be a carefully crafted BookTok video. It can be a few lines on your review platform of choice, or a simple photo post on your preferred social media platform. Don’t forget to tag the author to make their day and help them share your post! (But for the love of all the gods, don’t tag authors in negative reviews. That is not helpful!)

If you can’t leave a review, please consider leaving a rating. For better or worse, we live in an algorithmic world and ratings matter to a writer’s career. Every rating you leave on Goodreads, Amazon, Indigo, wherever actually does make a small difference to getting an author shown to potential readers, and it takes very little time to click on a star.

For what it’s worth, I think star ratings for books and other cultural works is madness. They’re not blenders (although my books have been called genre blenders!). I just give everything I read and like five stars because it’s all a matter of personal taste anyway. It’s the best I can do until someone comes up with a better system. Like maybe the number of times parts of a book have been highlighted and bookmarked….

Subscribe to the magazines that publish writing you like. This is a really simple one. If people don’t subscribe, then those magazines will cease to publish and there won’t be writing you like. It’s the same as buying books. Without a supportive community, there is no culture.

Most magazines can be found on Patreon these days, which makes it pretty easy to subscribe to them, and digital subscriptions are usually quite affordable. As a bonus feature, many magazines offer specialized communities to their subscribers in the form of Discord groups. So you’re getting twice the community for the price of one subscription!

Get out in person to events if you can. Go to the writers’ festivals, the reading series, the book launches, the conventions, and so on. If there aren’t in your area, then consider starting some. Join a writing group and use it for more than writing. (My writing group mostly plays games these days.) The same goes for book clubs. We’re social and physical creatures, and nothing builds community like presence. Most of my best and enduring friendships have been because of real-world events like this. 

Once again, read, read, read!

Writers are probably the most antisocial people around. After all, our ideal state is to be locked alone in a room all day, trying to convince imaginary people to do what we want them to do. Most days we’d rather read about other imaginary people than leave our homes to meet real people. If you’re a writer, you’re probably nodding in agreement at this point.

There is nothing more important to writers than community, though. In fact, I think building or joining a community is where the writing starts. I never would have become a published author if not for the university writing group I joined, which for the first time introduced me to editorial feedback, other perspectives on writing, revisions and writing to deadline. That writing group became some of my closest friends, and those friendships persist today even though we are scattered across the continent. (I swear they’re not all trying to avoid me.)

The value of finding like-minded people cannot be overstated. Did I say value? More like critical need. Without such a network, you are in a void when you start out, and you will be writing into the void. A community gives you an audience, gives you affirmation that what you are doing is worthwhile and necessary, gives you a path of development.

Of course, not everyone can find a local community. And there’s something to be said for joining online communities even if you do have a writing group that meets in person. Your writing community can never be too large. Or perhaps you need more than one community to fill all your needs. I contain multitudes and all that.

I have a local community in my area that has helped a great deal with improving my writing over the last few years. Hell, I likely wouldn’t have written anything without them. I was going through a hard time in my personal life, and writing would have been the last thing on my mind if not for my community. As it turned out, that writing group was what kept me sane and motivated during some crazy times. If not for the accountability of writing to hit the group’s deadlines, collaborating in some writing sprints, etc., I don’t know what would have happened.

We’ve mostly moved the group online to a dedicated Discord server but still meet in person once a month for games nights. And I’ve joined other groups to meet the needs they can’t fulfill — a different writing group for other projects, Codex and SFWA for writing and market chats, and a few private Patreon groups linked to magazines. All those communities help keep me immersed in a culture of inspiration and creation, which is half the battle right there when it comes to writing. And most of the battle when it comes to procrastination.

So what makes for a good community?

Make sure you find or create a community that actually helps you contribute to your development. That development can be different things at different stages of your life. It could simply be having readers and deadlines for accountability to keep you writing, or it could be beta readers to help polish your book for publication, or it could be agents who can connect you with markets. It could just be a group of writers talking different theories of writing. My writing group spent time studying Save the Cat, the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey, and various Masterclasses.

Whatever it is that you need to become a better writer, you’ll find that a writing community will better help you achieve your goals. And hopefully keep you sane in the process! Well, as sane as a writer can be….

Some time ago I was struggling to get any writing done and didn’t know how to get past it. My publishing career wasn’t going well, I had a number of personal issues that were disrupting my focus and writing felt like work rather than the thing that brought me joy. I was basically avoiding my desk because it wasn’t a happy space. The situation was unsustainable and I knew I had to rethink what I was doing. In short, I felt like almost every other writer.

I took a break to just read for a while, as one does in such moments, as reading may be the only acceptable form of procrastination. I happened to reread Atomic Habits by James Clear, and his thoughts on the importance of well-running systems suddenly resonated with me. Clear says goals are great for creating direction but ultimately unachievable if you don’t also have a good system for making progress. Every writer I know will see the wisdom in this.

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy,” Clear says. “You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.”

I realized what I was lacking was a happiness system for my writing, which meant I wasn’t really able to achieve any of my goals because I couldn’t stick to the process properly. So I set about to change that, starting with my desk. The desk in my office was where I had been doing everything — my work for my day job, paying my bills, doomscrolling, checking my email and my writing. So it was a place of constantly conflicted feelings, with endless distractions to my focus. I decided to make it purely a creative space dedicated to my writing. Archaic perhaps, like buying a record player to listen to music, but sometimes there’s value in returning to the old ways. (Although I draw the line at chicken pox parties.)

First, I moved everything not related to my writing out of my office. I now do the work for my day job in a separate room, I keep up with the news on my phone rather than my writing computer, I don’t bother paying bills anymore, and so on.

Once I had cleared my desk of work, I redecorated it with things that made me happy to look at. I’ve long been a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast (I’m a writer, remember?), so I framed some D&D postcards and put them on my desk. Just looking at them puts me in a good mood. I added a model of a Tintin rocket because Explorers on the Moon sparked my imagination as a child and I’ve never really grown up. My coffee mug coaster is a map from Lord of the Rings. My ReLit Award ring is always handy as a pick-me-up when I’m feeling down. I’m adding little things here and there that spark joy.

Now when I sit at my desk, I’m automatically put into a happy mood by the items on it. That makes me more willing to spend time at my desk, and the more time I spend there the more writing I get done. Sure, everyone else complains I’ve become a hermit — but I’m a happy, productive hermit!

So one of my most important pieces of advice to other writers is to create a happiness system — and start with a happy desk.

If there’s one thing every writer needs, it’s a second brain.

No, I don’t mean a brain in a jar — although I’m sure there are some writers out there who have just such a thing decorating their office. Hey, no judgement from me.

I mean an external system for collecting and organizing all the information in your life — in other words, the things your real brain isn’t that great at remembering. Like editor’s notes and deadlines. In the past maybe that was post-it notes decorating every inch of the walls of your writing space like some mad person arguing with imaginary people — aka a writer. Or perhaps it was something more sane, like a commonplace book. These days, for better or worse, it tends to be an app.

Why do you need a second brain when the whole point of writing is to create something out of your imagination? Because it’s nearly impossible to keep track of every idea and element that goes into creating a written work without it. How many scribbled notes to yourself have you forgotten in a pocket or lost on transit, to be found by some other aspiring writer who will then turn it into a bestseller? How many inspiring articles have you emailed to yourself only to lose them somewhere in the depths of your inbox, where a Lovecraftian AI is slowly using them to achieve sentience? How many times have you forgotten what happens next in the outline of your story when those imaginary people refuse to do what you tell them? Our real brains are great at processing information — oh no, here comes a horde of zombies! — but not so good at retaining it. Cue the second brain.

Thankfully, there are a number of apps out there that are of immense value to writers and other people with more productive lives. I use Notion to create mini-wikis for my writing projects where I collect ideas, outlines, character profiles, settings, general notes, divine/infernal visions and so on. I also use it to organize my reading lists and keep track of my publications — published, pending, in progress, weird monstrosities, etc. Notion has a very simple and clean interface but is infinitely customizable once you get the hang of it, which I am sure to do one day. Other writers use Ulysses or Scrivener, while more generalist apps such as Evernote, Asana and Obsidian can also serve well as second brains (although they lack the literary names of the others I mentioned).

It doesn’t matter what system you use as long as you develop a second brain to help keep yourself organized. Your real brain will thank you once it realizes it no longer has to futilely attempt to keep track of things and can now focus on creating. And procrastinating.

And yes, I originally created this post in my second brain.