The Buddy System

As evidenced by every other Buzzfeed article in the last year, introverts are having a moment. Like most writers, I'm a hermit, so I'm really enjoying the current social zeitgeist. Avoiding people is suddenly on-trend? Guess I'll put on my party dress and sit on the couch with my dog and some Eudora Welty stories. YOLO.

Though a Salinger-like life certainly has its charms (teenage girls and strange dietary restrictions notwithstanding) ,if you're aiming to actually, you know, publish your work, writing in a vacuum might not be the best choice. At some point, you're going to need feedback, or new perspectives, or free coffee, or prompts to jolt you out of the rut you've been trying unsuccessfully to write your way out of.

That said, it's 2014 2015. Community does not have to mean leaving the house. Although I do grudgingly put on pants and go to real life events like writer's groups and workshops, I also have a novelist email buddy that I correspond with throughout the week. If you're not already swapping work with someone via the interwebs, here's why you should:

1. You're accountable to someone other than yourself. When I tell myself that I'll write five pages on Saturday morning, whoops, Golden Girls marathon. When I tell my email buddy I'll have something for her by Tuesday, I'll usually have it by Wednesday, latest.

2. You'll strengthen your critical muscles (and learn more about your own work.) My email buddy has an enviable vocabulary and is given to beautiful, labyrinthine sentences that leave me breathless. Midway through one of her paragraphs, I'm usually craving a shorter sentence, just to give a chance to restore that breath. After pointing this out to her in an email, I set out to work on an in-progress piece of mine and noticed, for the first time, that I'm also given to long, ornate sentences with little breathing room. Pot, kettle. (See what I did there?)

3. You get to read stories! As long as you jot down a couple of feedback notes and send them to your buddy, reading their fascinating novel in progress totally counts as working.

4. Your feelings stay safe. My buddy is an all-around cool lady and I always enjoy chatting with her through email, but she has never tread through the muck of my life. There is something to be said for swapping work with someone who doesn't know everything about you, someone who wasn't privy to your heartbreaks and your influences. She is able to focus on my work instead of trying to figure out whether or not my piece is about my ex-boyfriend, and I am able to focus on hers without mining for similar autobiography. Critical feedback is also much easier to take from a colleague than it is from someone that held your hair back in the bathroom of a dive bar that one really bad night when you were 26 and unemployed.

So, go forth and buddy up from the comfort of your own home! Just like your mother said, you can make friends anywhere. I found mine through a mutual friend, but craigslist works too, and there are numerous forums on Facebook. I'm not here to tell you how to use the internet.