A Kernel on Finding Your Writing Community

and bucking the tired writer trope

Hi, y’all!

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Kernel: inspiration, information, and insight for writers by writers. I’m Shelby, and I write this newsletter along with my fellow Kernelists Natalia, Neidy, and Sarah (check out our bios below to get to know us). A bit of backstory before we dive into our first topic: All four of us met through our biweekly fiction workshop, which we found through the MFA Draft Facebook group, and have since extended our conversations to group chats, book clubs, and writing sprints (a combination of the Pomodoro Technique and body doubling). We’re our biggest supporters, motivators, sympathizers, encouragers. We’ve created our own ecosystem to immerse ourselves in what we’ve all proven is our lives’ dedication: writing.

One evening, when I was sprinting with Neidy, I mentioned my desire to write a newsletter again (hi to my previous readers!), to have an outlet to share my thoughts on writing and the process, but I didn’t want to do it alone. Neidy was suspicious at first: Sounds like a lot of work, she either said out loud or in her head—I can’t remember which, but either way, I could feel her hesitation. But I convinced her it wouldn’t be, not really. We could do it as a group—it’d be an extension of the conversations we were already having with each other. Conversations that we would love to have overheard from other writers. Once Neidy was on board, we approached Natalia and Sarah, who were quick to jump on. And thus, our inception.

Here’s what to expect (you can also check out our about page, which is where this information will live):

• Weekly missives on the many facets of writing

• Round-ups of what we’re reading

• Interviews with other writers and creatives

• Longform chats amongst us Kernelists, diving into a heftier topic

But as any living, breathing project can attest, these are subject to change. Now, onward to this week’s missive!

On building a writing community

Imagine the writer trope, you know the one I’m talking about: brooding writer in agony, pulling words out of their mind as if they are pulling teeth from their mouth, the epitome of woe-is-me energy. This writer is in isolation and prides themselves on it—an incorrigible badge of honor of sorts. They are depressed or sad (and not going to therapy!) or only available to work when The Muse strikes them. They are as capricious as your matches DMing you on Tinder.

This version of a writer is a lonely one and reflects a deeply flawed view of the writer’s life, disregarding the consistent showing up a writer must do to succeed and creating a divide between the writer’s internality and everything else. This halving is on purpose to exclude the writer from their community, perpetuating the masochistic desire to be seen as different. And honestly, this farce flattens us and creates a mockery of our very dimensional selves.

Because we writers aren’t different—not in that supercilious way the trope imagines. We share the same passion and drive that keeps us coming to the page day in and day out. We share rejections and learning curves and a love for reading. We’re studying grammar so our sentences can sing and plot devices so we can better tell our stories. Some of us share the same desire to attend an MFA program, others the same desire to write screenplays or novels or poetry. Through immersion and osmosis, we grow, but not without community.  

From the moment I started taking writing seriously in my late twenties, I sought out community with little success. Instinctively, I knew I needed the support and wisdom of other writers and editors to grow, as well as their solace to endure the journey. It wasn’t until March 2021 when I joined my current fiction workshop that I really understood the depths and binding a community can provide.

Unless you’re already tapped into Lit Twitter or have a mentor who’s well into their writing career, nobody tells you how your writing will be bad—until it gets good, which literary magazines are worth submitting to, or which presses will bamboozle you for money. Nobody tells you that you’re trying too hard to be like [redacted writer] or that your dialogue falls flat because you need to spend time observing conversations in the world.

Nobody tells you, but your community can—and they’ll do so with the care and sensitivity they want for themselves. They’ll also reinforce your strengths, note recurring themes, and applaud your growth.

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts the writing group she formed in her twenties that named themselves The Fat Kids: “We held each other to deadlines and encouraged each other to submit our work to publishers. We came to know each other’s voices and hang-ups, and we helped each other to work through our specific habitual obstacles.”

Without deadline enforcers and submission encouragers and knowers of your greatest strengths and fatal flaws, how far would you really get? Especially if you want any form of commercial success—whether that’s as simple as someone reading your newsletter (oh, hi!) or getting a story accepted in a small lit mag or publishing your novel with one of the Big Five—you need to emerge from the inwardness of your mind to understand your capabilities and how they connect to and interact with the world. 

Writer Dan Blank says, “I encourage you to have colleagues: others who create work similar to yours that you can at least talk to. As you move down the path to publishing and sharing your work, consider the kind of help you may need along the way. This is important regardless of the publishing path you take: indie, hybrid, traditional, etc. These are relationships that will open up opportunities in ways you least expect, and most need. They also become the foundation for your support system as a writer.”

Having a group of writers you can count on, who are going through the same processes as you, makes a life’s dedication to writing sustainable. Because writing is endurance, after all, and when the writing isn’t going well or you’ve received a rejection for the umpteenth time or you’re just feeling blah, it’s easy to give up when you don’t have the friendly encouragement of a familiar face.

My kernel of advice: find your posse and hold on to them tightly.

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Inspiration, Information, & Insight

• Neidy is listening to the audiobook of Grant Ginder’s Let’s Not Do That Again. She’s taking notes on the complicated family dynamics and multiple points of view.

• Shelby is in the middle of too many books—most notably: How It Feels to Find Yourself by Meera Lee Patel, From Dream to Reality: How to Make a Living as a Freelance Writer by Jessie L. Kwak, and The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope (thanks to Sarah for the rec!). She’s also still thinking about

  Devin Kate Pope
  ’s
  enough
  newsletter issue on identity and limitations where Pope writes about her time at a newsroom job: “Being ‘good in the scramble’ could only get me so far because ‘the scramble’ was a place with limits and rules where I couldn’t thrive as my full self.”

• Sarah is binge-listening to the CBC podcast “Let’s Make a Sci-Fi,” geeking-out on the 2020 recordings of Hilary Mantel’s series of Reith Lectures for the BBC, and reading Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. Her personal essay “The Rookery,” about nature, community and motherhood, was just published in the Spring 2023 issue of Wellesley magazine.

• Natalia is reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019 The Best Short Stories of the Year, 2020 Pushcart Prize XLIV Best of the Small Presses, and Alice Munro’s personal selection of stories, Carried Away. Natalia is trying to reverse engineer the magic of the short story for herself. She is also reading The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner because it’s a novel written in small sections and written from the first person perspective, which she is also trying to get better at.