Fresh Air: Why the People Around You Matter in Creative Work
I’ve been writing publicly on the internet since May of 2010, the same month I finished graduate school. It was the height of the blogging days of yore, when chronicling our thoughts almost diary-style for our mothers and a dozen of our closest friends was all the rage. Itching to keep writing, but in a different manner and form than I had just spent the last three years doing in the academic world, I jumped on the trend and channeled all of my energy into being as much like Shauna Niequist as I possibly could. And if I got a comment on my blog post?! Oof. A single comment could carry my self esteem for the day (I mean, it still can, I’ll be honest).
For the next four to five years, I wrote on my own. I drafted a piece, re-read it once or twice, and hit publish. And in some ways, that worked okay. A small audience who was interested in what I had to say still grew. Some of the essays really resonated with readers. I was writing, and I loved it.
And then at some point, I began swapping my writing with friends. It was most often my monthly Coffee + Crumbs essay, and I would share the work with another writer on the team who would give line edits and feedback and also leave a nice comment or two. And it was helping. Like, really helping. Small details I hadn’t thought of, sentence structure I didn’t realize could be so much more clear, additions that would serve the story that hadn’t even crossed my mind to put in. It was always the tiniest bit vulnerable to send my work off and wait and wonder, “Do you like it?” But without fail, every single time, the piece was not just a little better, but exponentially better than my original work.
By the end of 2020, I had connected with my mastermind group and we began regularly sharing our work—twice a month thanks to our diligent “secretary”, Sarah—with one another. Now, three people were reading everything I wrote. They were getting to know my voice, the way I tend to end my essays too simply, and my affection for sentences that are probably (definitely?) too long but I write them anyway. The more familiar they grew with the intricacies of my work, the more thoughtfully they could edit me.
And best of all, the more generative our group became.
Not only could this crew give me feedback, even tough feedback at times, they started giving me ideas. I would be on Voxer, telling them a story, and then one of them would say, “Katie, you have to put that in an essay!” or “Katie, what if you told that story hermit crab style?”
I still remember the day I mentioned, “I have such a girl crush on my son’s principal” and just gushed about her care for my boy on the autism spectrum, and Sonya says, “Katie, I want “Girl Crush” to be your next Substack piece. We need stories like that in the world.” Or the day I said something about the kind feedback a small group of people had given me about the book I self-published, Gluing the Cracks, and I said, “It’s nice to hear about all these little micro-impacts the book is making.” Ashlee jumped on the phrase, and responded to my message, “Katie, I love that term, micro-impact. Could you do a "defining word” piece on that?” And then there was the day I was, once again, complaining to my friends about how exhausted I was, driving around town playing prescription hide and seek with my son’s medication, and Sarah suggested, “You could make that a fun quiz-style piece if you wanted to write through it, Katie, kind of like the ones in the magazines we used to do as teenagers.” And because they are all smarter women than me, I did what they said.
None of these pieces are in the world today if the ideas weren’t thought up by someone else.
There have also been times these friends have stopped me from publishing something I’d regret later. I remember clearly the night I opened up some feedback from Sonya on a piece I wrote a few months after my divorce, an essay I thought was really honest and vulnerable, and Sonya said, “Katie, I know this was hard to write, but I need to be honest: I feel like this is something I shouldn’t be reading. I think this one is just for you.” Offended, I slammed my computer shut, and vowed I would never again let Sonya edit my work.
Until, of course, I realized she was absolutely, without a doubt, correct. And goodness, did she save me from a huge lapse in discernment, and I am forever thankful.
The writer I was 15 years ago was earnest and eager. The writer I am today is humble and, dare I say, maybe even seasoned. And the writing is far better for it. The only real difference: surrounding myself with the right people. People who have set a high bar for me. People who can help me frame the experiences in my life into the stories that need to be told, or help me filter the ones that don’t. People who will tell me what lands, what resonates.
People who won’t let me quit writing when I wonder about 287 times a year if I should.
I read a quote once that said, “The people around you either suck the air out of the room, or they bring oxygen in.” And I realized, that’s exactly what writing in community has done for me: helped me breathe in the fresh air that keeps me going. This creative work we do is not easy, and every single one of us will lack confidence and purpose at some point in our lives. And that’s when we need to take a deep breath, and figure out a way to try again.
That deep breath will be so much easier, so much more clear, with fresh air in the room.
Questions for Reflection:
Do you write or do your creative work alone? What keeps you from sharing your work with others for feedback
How do you handle being critiqued?
Is there someone you could ask today to swap work with, even once a month?
What would it look like for you to be oxygen to someone else? What good could you point to in someone else’s life, what stories have inspired you, that you could tell someone, “I think you should write about that.”