Last year I did a survey on my Youtube channel asking writers, “What do you need?”

3,200 writers responded.

I thought the clear winner would be one-on-one coaching, or weekly feedback on their writing.

What writer wouldn’t love that kind of thoughtful attention? But what surprised me was that the clear winner was something else entirely.

Something I nearly left off the survey, because I didn’t think it was nearly important.

It was a writing community.

Look at those results! Having writing friends and a community scored nearly double the runner-up of weekly feedback (which I always considered the holy grail for writers).

And in the comments, people reinforced that voting preference.

The top comment was someone whose biggest desire was “an interested friend that they can bounce ideas off of.”

Other people mentioned:

• they wanted a “a close knit group of writers”

• they wanted to start “a local writers group.”

• “In the writing world, it's hard to find friends.”

Is the art of writing inherently lonely? Or have we just gotten worse at connecting with people, even with all the wonderful tools of the internet and technology?

Sometimes I think that it’s precisely because of technology that we feel so lonely. Everyone’s in their own house, scrolling on social media and surfing the internet and watching the television, wishing they could connect with another writer.

This same problem of friendship came up when I did a video on validating your novel idea.

I proposed 8 tests that your novel idea should pass, and the first one was to have a dinner party where you talked about your novel idea as if it were a book you were reading, in order to gauge reader interest.

I had no idea that a dinner party would be so controversial. I got SAVAGED in the comment section.

Mainly for being so presumptuous as to assume people had enough friends to host a dinner party.

There were hundreds of comments like these:

• “I don’t have any friends.”

• “I couldn't get a dinner party together to pitch a story.”

• “I highly doubt anyone has enough friends for a dinner party.”

Whelp … didn’t expect that!

Hey writers — are y’all just really lonely?

It’s ironic, because now, more than any other time in history, we have the ability to connect with people across vast distances and time.

We have online forums for writers, and discord servers, and Facebook groups, and Youtube communities, and Bluesky/Threads/Twitter, and Wattpad, and #BookTok, and virtual writing retreats, and MeetUp, and NaNoWriMo (well, we used to).

Yet after all that, writers still feel alone.

I once attended a writing retreat in Northern California called “Community of Writers” (it was called Squaw Valley Writers, back in the day, but they’ve changed their name).

And I have to say, it did give me some rich friendships with fellow writers. I still remember our little dance parties fondly, and talking in the hot tub, and the group passing a joint on the back porch, and my attempts to pitch novel ideas to the famous novelists (Amy Tan, Anne Lamott).

Is that the answer for writer friendships? In-person events?

The trouble with that is that they end all too quickly. It’s a week, and then you hole back up in your cave and sweat words out for the other 51 weeks of the year.

Now, I’ve tried to solve this writing-friendship problem myself, although you can be the judge of how effective it’s been.

When I started Bookfox Lab I kept this desire for friendship in mind.

In the Lab I do my best to try to connect people, so they feel like they have compatriots on this big writing journey together.

• We have a social media platform called Circle.so where people can post stuff and interact with other people’s posts, and sometimes the discussion gets quite in-depth (like over what music you should listen to when writing!).

• We have readings, where you read from your work for 3 minutes, and others can praise it.

• We have group Craft Chats where you get to interact with everyone in the cohort.

• We have meetings where you get to connect with a writing mentor one-on-one.

Now, this isn’t a pitch for Bookfox Lab — although if you wanted to join, we have a cohort starting next week — but I do think it’s one piece of evidence in the attempt to try to diagnose and solve this perplexing lack of friendship.

On a personal level, I used to be part of two writing groups, a decade ago, and now I’m part of … none.

Part of that might be geography (Orange County might not be the artistic hotbed that Los Angeles is).

When I belonged to those two writing groups, that was when I felt most connected as a writer. I felt like all these people were in the trenches with me, trying to write something worth publishing.

I wasn’t walking alone.

The main trouble is that they’re difficult to join (I’ve tried to join several others and been dismayed by the other members). And they’re also difficult to form, especially in-person ones.

I haven’t had the luck of finding just the right people to join up with, and that’s been dismaying.

So you writers out there — how do you solve the loneliness problem?

If you’re still struggling with it, let me know in the comments.

If you’ve found a solution (even a partial one), leave that in the comments, too.

And may we all find a writing community that loves and supports us in this journey.

Best,

John Matthew Fox of Bookfox

Coaching Program: Bookfox Lab

Bookfox YouTube Channel