Friendship as a Writing Practice
Sally Cooper (right) and me at one of our weekly writing meetings during the pandemic.
When it comes to a writing practice, I don’t subscribe to anything with the whiff of orthodoxy.
Rising before the sun. Punitive word counts. Closed doors, headphones. Cabins in the woods. Regimens expressed as drawn lines – here’s what real writers do –minimize the messiness of actual lives, with all their creative saboteurs: children, spouses, money, grief, cranky bodies, and pandemics.
Sure, writing requires discipline. But I’ve found it’s almost as important to nurture what drives that discipline: the compulsion to write, that tender, urgent hunger that smoulders beneath the hum-drum of cleaning up and making coin, that wants to be fed, and becomes physical pain or sleeplessness, or a slow sliding dissatisfaction, if it isn’t.
How do you sustain such a compulsion? One way is to befriend someone else who has it.
Five years ago, the novelist Sally Cooper approached me about trying a writer’s contract. We knew each other as writers’ group acquaintances, but not well. If I’m honest, I was embarrassed to need a contract that would make me accountable for writing. But because I was floundering after my first novel, there was no reason not to try. Knowing that someone was checking my daily output and checking in with hers —we started with e-mail, moved to Google calendar— made the compulsion official, professional even, and most importantly, shared.
Over the next few years, while we worked together, Sally would publish two books, a novel and short story collection, and have several essays and short fiction pieces published. I was less prolific, yet that period still felt wonderfully productive. My second novel began. And the other writing that landed, landed well.
And so, our writing contract, its weekly meetups, dotted with doughnut crumbs and coffee rings, noisy with laughter, evolved. We wrote through loss, illness, unemployment, disappointments, cheering on each other’s occasionally elusive, often finicky compulsion to write through all the things that could batter it or extinguish it entirely. And if I worried that eventually we would grow out of the writing contract—we did—what replaced it was an unexpected grace: collaboration.
For the next two years, we used our weekly sessions to work on a screenplay. After it was finished, we started a new one with a third writer, a filmmaker.
All through this, the way I wrote outside of those sessions – trusting the creative compulsion to muscle into each day’s interstitial spaces, its few hours of free time, throwing words like paint in a happy, antic fury – didn’t change much.
Until it had to.
Sally said recently, there’s a difference between having a practice, and choosing a practice.
The pandemic had upended routines and certainty; it was time to choose. Now we’ve challenged each other to a back to-basics regimen, with, yup, some slightly punitive word counts. Five days a week, first thing in the morning.
It’s working brilliantly. For now. The strength of a regimen supported by a friendship, is knowing it won’t petrify, become dogmatic or too rigid. And maybe it won’t last. But after five years, what’s been cultivated is discipline — not the starched, hectoring kind – but one for nimbleness, a willingness to pivot, to stretch, to do whatever it takes, to keep the ember of compulsion glowing.
It’s not orthodox. Life is still messy. Yet the words tumble out.