A Successful Writer Seldom Gets There Alone. Here's Who You Need The Most.

No man is an island, and successful writers are no different.

Have you ever had a thought and struggled to find the right words?

Someone said good writing is clear thinking. The internet tells me it was William Wheeler. Or Ambrose Bierce. Or maybe David McCullough. But then, the internet also says Hemingway wrote the six word story about baby shoes, and he didn’t.

Point is, writing is hard. Typing, that’s easy. But writing? Different story.

Here’s a weird thought. Thirty years ago, the average person couldn’t write online and earn money for it. If you earned money writing, you were an author or you wrote for magazines or newspapers. Today, Medium punts a quarter million people off their platform every month for terms violations.

Know what the biggest difference for writers was then, compared to now?

No one just wrote and hit publish. Didn’t happen.

To give you an example, To Kill A Mockingbird was a wild success. Published in 1960, won the Pulitzer in 1961 and did 1.6 million in sales in 2009. Forty nine years after it was published. She never had to worry about money again, after that book.

If you think that’s because she was a damn fine writer, you’re dead wrong.

Harper Lee got lucky. But her greatest luck was that her manuscript landed on the desk of Tay Hohoff, a fifty-something editor at Lippincott. Tay took one look at it and said this book is not fit for publishing the way it is. But wow, this woman can write.

If that book landed on any other desk, you’d never know the name Harper Lee.

Two years. That’s how long Tay and Harper worked on the book. Passing it back and forth. Thirteen times she rewrote the book front to back. Once, Lee was so frustrated she pitched the book out the window, right into a snowbank. Called Tay and said I’m done, threw the damn thing in the snow. Tay said you get your butt out there, pick it up, and you rewrite it. Cause dammit, you’ve got something here. So she did.

Same thing with people writing for newspapers and magazines. Nothing hit the public eye without an editor working with the writer, shaping the story.

Here’s a thing people don’t realize.

Just because someone can write, doesn’t mean everything they write is good and doesn’t mean they know what’s good and which parts suck. They usually don’t.

Stephen King sure didn’t. Early seventies, living in a trailer and teaching high school English, he wrote a three page story hoping to sell it to a magazine. But he figured it sucked, thought it was because he didn’t know how to write like a teenage girl, so he pitched it in the trash. Came home and his wife pulled it out. Said the problem is this isn’t a short story it’s a novel. Keep writing it. So he listened. Kept writing. And then Carrie sold millions of copies, launched his entire career.

Same thing with Nabokov and his wife Véra except fool lit a fire in their backyard and was throwing pages in the fire when she ran to pull them out. She was his editor first. He fell crazy in love with her because of what she did for his writing, how clearly she saw what he was trying to say and molded and shaped his work.

He was not an island, either. No successful writer is an island.

If you like the personal stories behind literature like I do, you see it everywhere. Writers pairing up with other writers or editors. Mark Twain and Olivia. Married his editor. Tolstoy and Sophia. Married his editor.

Percy and Mary Shelley. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Joan Didion and John Dunne. Dunne once told The New York Times that he and Didion were each other’s “first reader, absolutely.''

That’s what it’s about.

The first set of eyes. A writer needs that.

Someone to read their words before the public does.

It’s the same sentiment that drives small writing groups like the Socrates School back in the era of the stoics. Like the Bloomsbury group with Virginia and Leonard Woolf and a bunch of famous writers of that era.

Like Stratford-on-Odeon with Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound giving each other feedback. Stein wasn’t just a writer but a killer editor. Every one of those writers would hand their work over to Stein and each other, hold their breath and wait for feedback. Every one of them was a better writer for it.

I can see it. I can say it.

But I have no frame of reference for what it’s like to have that.

There’s no one who reads my words before anyone else sees them. And I’m less for it and I know that. When I wrote for magazines, I worked with editors. But I haven’t written for print magazines for years. I miss the feedback.

If I write something and think it sucks, there’s no Tabitha King to say this is good, keep going, it needs to be longer. If I write something that sucks, there’s no Tay Hohoff to say it’s a good story, but you’ve gone too wide and not nearly deep enough.

It’s not just me. A lot of writers don’t have that. Maybe you don’t have that.

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A little aside. If you write on Medium, a lot of publication editors see themselves in that role. As the “first reader,” the first set of eyes on a piece of writing, there to help the writer shape the work. And some of them are. But many are not.

The problem occurs the minute someone tells you “how” to fix your work. Because then it’s their voice. Not yours. A good editor will never tell you “how” to fix your work. They will only point at what’s wrong. Let you figure it out. Find your way.

There are exceptions, of course. Every rule has exceptions.

Sometimes a writer and editor are so attuned to each other the editor can see how to fix it. Feel it in their gut. Nabokov and Véra. Kafka and Max Brod. Stephen and Tabitha King. Dunne and Didion. Absolute trust because of the connection they have.

But that’s rare. Mostly, an editor’s job is to point at the parts that need work. So if an editor points at what’s weak but won’t tell you how to fix it, you’re in good hands. Work with that editor more, not less.

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One other thing. I have no idea if you’re serious about writing. Some people write online because it’s there and it’s easy. And when it doesn’t fly, they say well screw that and stop writing. Some people are content creators and that’s all they want to do.

And then some people are serious. The people who are compelled to write. People who can’t not write. Me, I’m like that thing Kafka said about a non-writing writer being a monster courting insanity. Don’t write for too long and I start to go bananas.

So what do you do if you’re serious about writing and don’t have that second set of eyes you trust with your writing?

You hope. And keep your eyes open. And maybe one day you find it.

And until you find that, you do your best to be your own second set of eyes. It’s not easy. Sometimes, time helps.

Charles Finch is a book critic for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He’s also a best-selling author. His first novel was one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007. Won the National Book Critics’ Circle award in 2017. He also writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune and more.

He says there’s no page of prose in existence that the writer can’t improve after leaving it in a drawer for a week. There’s validity to that. Time gives you editorial distance. Lets you read it from a vantage point of more distance.

Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit. And unlike all the quotes floating around that Hemingway didn’t say, he did say that one. And he’s dead right. Time can gives you emotional distance. Help you see through the reader’s eyes a little.

Only problem with Finch’s advice is that it requires the writer to know something about what makes writing good in the first place. If a writer thinks purple prose, tired old tropes, cliché and padded prose are good writing, time won’t help. It can’t.

If you’re going it alone and struggling, don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up for the duds. Don’t take too much credit for the wins, either. And keep your eye out for someone who can reliably point at the weak bits without telling you how to fix them. You just never know where you’ll find that second set of eyes. Your job isn’t to find them. It’s to recognize them when they show up.

Love to know what you think.

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Elizabeth Barrett & Robert Browning

Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

Joan Didion, an editor at Vogue, met John Dunne

Dunne once told The New York Times that he and Didion were each other’s “first reader, absolutely.''

Vladimir Nabokov and Véra Nabokov

Mark Twain) and Olivia

the one in Portland that Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Chuck Palahniuk belong to—can launch the careers of bestsellers. I