You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.
The YA author community is generally pretty friendly, and they care.
In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?
Wandering the book fair at AWP is a great way to get acquainted with a wide sampling of the diverse journals that are out there and the wide sampling of people who produce them.
Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success!
I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It's an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.
I've had great writing teachers and mentors and great success with my first book.
I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.
Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.
The first time I met Harlan Ellison, we were both unpublished young punks in Cleveland, Ohio.
People really want to set up these rivalries because there's a lot of vampire books out there. People want to believe we're all fierce rivals, and really there's just so much camaraderie with authors. Everyone kind of boosts each other.
Acquiring an aggressive, honest, and communicative agent with actual relationships in real-live New York publishing houses is, in my opinion, the single most important move that a writer who aspires to be successful can make.
The Fiction Writer's Co-op has 51 members, from celebrated NYT bestsellers to promising newcomers, and a waiting list.
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
