The Legend of "The Writing Community"
As someone who's had a writing habit/hobby for a long time, I've heard a lot about the importance of building a writing community. It's mentioned as a way to improve your writing through feedback, and as the best way to market your writing. There's a cynical edge to this, of course...like when kids are encouraged to do volunteer work to get into college. On the other hand, the practice of building community offers us the opportunity to get outside of ourselves, even if it’s for selfish purposes.
We're all self-absorbed, I guess, though it manifests differently in each of us. One of the toughest things to learn in life is that other people feel what we feel. We might understand it intellectually, but it’s hard to process it emotionally. We all want to be important, or at least special, or at least loved. Some games in life have winners and losers...Super Bowls...gambling...baking contests. Still, if all of us matter, then there has to be life outside of tournaments.
Lately, I've been writing a story very loosely related to legends about Percival, a knight of King Arthur's court who discovers and (in some versions) eventually gains possession of the Holy Grail. The first Percival story we have access to is from a poem written by Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th century, and it’s about a backwoods Welsh country boy whose mother has tried to keep all knowledge of knighthood away from him to protect him. When Percival finally learns about the existence of knights, he sets off as a brave fool to try to become one. He has adventures along the way that help him understand the wider world. Eventually, he finds a strange castle inhabited by a wounded fisherman who invites him to dinner, and while he’s being entertained inside the castle, he sees a procession of strange mystical objects, including an elaborately decorated dish. Percival knows this dish is important, but he’s not sure what’s going on. His mentor knight warned him not to ask silly questions, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong with the fisherman. He doesn’t ask what’s going on at all. As a result, he must leave the castle to wander in adventureland before he gets another rematch with the grail.
The Chrétien de Troyes version of the tale is unfinished, so we never get to the payoff in his tale. Percival is doomed to wander forever. Other stories about Percival do have an ending, though, and in them, Percival often finds that the grail is not a prize to be won, but a sacred duty.
I’m reminded of this as I think about the idea of the writing community, or any community. We all have our own goals, to be the hero of our stories in whatever way we see fit. We might want to ride off to fight monsters. We might want to become famous and go to parties. We might want to be renowned magicians. So to speak.
And yet, when someone communes with us in an honest way, we’re forced to confront the fact that they have their destiny, too. They have their own distant hopes and dashed dreams, and their stories are just as compelling and important as our own. Their feelings are felt as strongly. We can only be the main character of one story, our own. Even someone who is famous isn’t the main character of their fans’ lives. They become a symbolic figure, like Percival, someone who entertains with their adventures or lights a way forward.
As I could say at any time, we’ve had controversies in the “writing community” in recent weeks, and I really do think we are a kind of community of writers and readers, though maybe we’re more like a herd of cats. As we go forward, there are always opportunities to ask questions. How can we be happy in a community when we aren’t the main character (because really, there isn’t one)? How can we care for everyone? How can we make sure everyone feels important and safe? How do we react when someone betrays our values? Is it possible to have hard but productive conversations with people we only really know online?
Good luck in asking the questions you want to ask this week!