Finding your tribe

Whatever you make, whether it’s as ephemeral as music or as physical as furniture, it’s a lot more fun when you belong to a group that encourages you, helps you solve problems, and critiques your projects. You become friends and your work improves.

My writing group is called the Radish Farm, a name that comes from a New Yorker’s interpretation of a Southerner’s pronunciation of the Writers’ Forum. There are four of us, and we adopted the name because it conjures up an image of a root vegetable unusual for its spiciness, and because we can call ourselves the Rads. 

At a recent conference outside of Nashville

If you’re thinking of getting a group together, it helps to know what others do. But you have to make the process your own, depending on the craft you practice, the personalities involved, and the culture you live in. This is what we do: several days before our monthly meeting, we email our fellow Rads the pages we’ve been working on. This gives us time to read each other’s work (sometimes more than once) and write down our thoughts. We also think about how to frame our feedback so the person receiving it can best take it in.

Writing is a solitary business, so we meet in each other’s homes. We hang out, have a glass of wine and a few appetizers, then sit down to dinner. The host makes the main course, and the others bring sides. All this goes on between 6 and 7 p.m. Then we move to the living room. 

We each get thirty minutes of feedback—ten minutes from each of the other Rads. It helps to time this, but we don’t spaz out about it. One person might comment for four minutes, another for fourteen. What’s key is this: the person receiving the feedback doesn’t defend or explain her pages, which would slow down the process and interfere with her own listening. 

After all the feedback has been given, then the writer whose work is being critiqued gets to talk, usually to clarify her intentions and ask questions about the feedback. The “critics” can also to respond to each other’s comments—as in “I agree with what you said about this, but not about that, and here’s why.”

This process takes a lot of trust. We know and care about each other’s projects. We get invested. We talk about what works as well as what doesn’t. We get specific. We want our feedback to be actionable, but we don’t insist that it be acted on. It’s the other person’s book, after all.

Sometimes we go out for dinner and just hang out. We’ve traveled to writing conferences, and we’ve created our own retreats. We have tiffs every now and then, but we talk them out and move on. We email each other between meetings. We help each other make our writing stronger. 

What do you love making? Who helps you make it better and have more fun doing it? If you don’t have a group, what can you do to find your tribe or create one?

What keeps us creating when there's no guarantee of worldly success?

I often think about people who spend years on their craft, hoping for financial reward or public acclaim but knowing that it might never come. What fascinates them so much that they keep on working, regardless of the external results? Maybe it’s a love of the process—but the process has to go beyond just having a good time. It has to teach us something about ourselves, our lives, our world.

Last week, insecure about putting myself in cyperspace in a public way, I sent out my first newsletter, which let people know that I’ve finished my memoir, a coming-of-age story set in West Africa. People I haven’t seen in years—and some I’ve never met—wrote back to congratulate me and tell me they can’t wait to read The Geography of Desire. I’m forever grateful for their enthusiastic support.

I’ve tried several studios over the years, but this is where I work best.

When I say I’ve “finished” my memoir, it doesn’t mean I’ve found a publisher—only that after years of writing, getting feedback, and revising, I’m satisfied that I’ve made the manuscript the best as I can. Now it’s time to start looking for a literary agent, who will hopefully sell my work to a publisher. Many writers—especially unknown ones like me—approach scores of agents before landing one. Some never do. 

I began my bookover a decade ago, knowing that it might not get picked up by a big house like Penguin. But the longer I worked, the less important that seemed. I became absorbed by the process: making a little-known corner of the world come alive, getting at the emotional truth of my story, and creating a narrative with forward momentum. I became more confident in my writing and gained a deeper understanding of my life. And that—whether I end up publishing with a big house, a little indie press, or a site like Wattpad—is precious to me. 

If you’re one of those people making art and hoping to sell it but knowing you might fail, ask yourself what your creative process teaches you about yourself, your life, your world. Then, when the indifference of the marketplace makes you wonder why you keep it up, you’ll have your answer.