A Community of Words
5. Create Community (The Encouragement Manifesto)
What a delight to have as our first contributor to The Gift of Words *
* follow this link if you would like to add to this collection of encouraging words.
We hope this collection will be a source of inspiration and encouragement for our growing community so we are thrilled that Evelyn chose ‘5. Create Community’ from The Encouragement Manifesto to get us started.
Evelyn’s work has been published worldwide and translated into more than fifteen languages. Prior to becoming an author, she was an attorney at renowned international law firms Latham & Watkins and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property licensing. Evelyn is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.
I am a novelist by trade, but before that - for as long as I can remember - I've been a storyteller. The stories began as silly oral tales when I was a child (they frequently involved snakes getting run over in the middle of the road, much to the chagrin of my Taiwanese grandmother, who was born in the Year of the Snake on the lunar calendar). Then, as soon as I could write in elementary school, I began to tell my stories in little vignettes and poems.
My first Community of Words was a county-wide anthology of elementary school kids' writing. The cover art was drawn by a student in a city I had never heard of, and a poem of mine was included in the anthology with writing by kids who lived not only in my own town, but also other cities I had to look up on a map. What a joy it was to get to share my words with others I'd never met in person and also to read their words!
Later, when I was a new mother and had re-discovered the joys of storytelling, I wanted to find more community. But it didn't exist where I lived, or at least not in the form I was looking for.
So I decided to build the Community of Words that I craved. Through a local bookstore, I put out a call for anyone who might want to start a book club of writers (who were also parents and could meet during lunchtime, while our kids were in school). The idea was that we could hang out once a month, chat about what we were working on, and discuss a book we'd read from a writer's perspective (did the plot work? If not, where did it falter? Why was the protagonist universally beloved--what tricks did the author employ to make that happen?)
That Community of Words ran for seven wonderful years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I still count those writers as some of my closest friends. We encouraged each other's writing, celebrated when one-by-one, we slowly acquired agents and then got published, and we commiserated with each other when publishing didn't quite work out as we'd hoped.
The act of being part of a community is filled with such joy and gratitude - we cherish those around us for listening to us, for opening their hearts and sharing the raw feelings inside, for being there when we need them and so that we can be there for them, too, in the ups and the downs and all the in-betweens.
If you are searching for your own Community of Words and cannot find one, I encourage you to try your hand at building your own. Maybe it is small with two other members. Or maybe it grows large, full of new, wonderful people you didn't know existed before.Â
For my part, I miss my old book club. So I am taking my own advice and building it anew, except this time, I'm following the model of my childhood county anthology and spreading this new, online Book Club for Writers and Curious Readers even farther than my own city, so that writers from places I've never heard of can join this Community of Words, too.
I wish for all of you the contented sense of belonging, to find a Community of Words to nestle into. Maybe it is here on Substack, maybe it is an in-person critique group of writers, or maybe it is in being part of the audience at author events at your local bookstore.Â
You are never alone in your words if you do not wish to be. Sending love and much happy reading (and writing) to all of you!
Evelyn Skye
For more of Evelyn’s writing, you can find her at WORDPLAY with Evelyn Skye, a warm and uplifting community for readers and writers where she shares author interviews and behind-the-scenes peeks at a New York Times bestselling novelist’s life, and runs the very fun WORDPLAY Book Club for Writers and Curious Readers (where you not only share your thoughts on the book of the month but also get to listen to writers analyze what did and didn’t work in the story, and why).
Love this idea and call to action - if the community you want doesn't exist, create it!
I like this idea. My wife has recently founded and hosted an inaugural book group. She finds reading very hard work (she's sure that she is, like my youngest, dyslexic) so was always arch-resistant to such a proposal. The proposal this time came from an author friend who herself has always wanted to be part of a book group but found she is often overlooked by book groups in the friendship groups she has, ironically, because of her profession! So she suggested that Charlotte start one with her and encouraged Charlotte to embrace audio books if reading really wasn't for her. They are due to meet with many other friends next month for the second time and, for the first time ever, Charlotte and I have 'read' the same book to be able to share our own opinions about it with each other. Communities are a lovely thing.