Although he’s having trouble making new fans among Salon readers, Steve Almond has forced the issue of how writers get along with other writers out in the open, which makes the thread running through the blogs of authors Cherie Priest and John Scalzi that much timelier. Priest, who after years of bad encounters “automatically assume[s] that other writers are assholes and that I don’t want to meet them,” identifies the source of her phobia when she nails what’s wrong with most writer’s workshops:
“The first defense against criticism is, ‘But I wrote this from my soul!’ Well, your soul is boring, pedantic, and has a pitiable grasp of comma usage. Sorry. But the final bulwark of culpable denial is always this — ‘I didn’t write it for you, I wrote it for me!’ Great. Then why are you subjecting other people to it?”
Scalzi’s time with other writers has been much more positive, but he considers the possibility that it’s because “for the vast majority of my working life I’ve been isolated from the type of ‘writer’ who sees writing as a holy calling, and have instead been exposed to the type of writer who sees it as their job.” He believes “a commonality of practical experience” as opposed to near-religious devotion to “craft” makes it easier for professional writers to get along, and suggests that science fiction writers—at least the ones he’s been hanging out with—are the swellest of the bunch: “They’re happy for their friends’ success, they’re generous in their friendship, and they tend also to be amusing as hell.” As the comments to his post unfurl, Priest herself shows up to admit, “I realized that part of my problem was that yes–I’ve been meeting the wrong kinds of writers.”