L sits across from me as I type this. We’ve been at this glass-encased box of a cafe near campus for two hours, and I’m just now starting to write. Before settling into work, we discussed our various projects, swapped advice, ranted about TV, gossiped, snacked on fries and brownies, built our case for why Charli XCX should have won the Nobel instead of Bob Dylan, and procrastinated sending out pitches and submissions. L hits “send” on my book review since I am too anxious to do it. “You got this,” she says. This is the work that cultivates a writerly friendship, and it’s precisely moments like these—bonding with my fellow writer friends through our work—that allow me to funnel my creative energy into language.

People think the writing life is a solitary one. They imagine a writer locked away in a room of her own with only the company of books, or retreating to a remote cabin surrounded by nature, or holed up in a studio that blocks out the city’s distractions—American individualism, artist edition. But writing need not be inherently isolating. Just because there is only one author does not mean there are not many forces shaping what words make their way onto the page. Writing can be collaborative: reading each other’s notebooks and making margin comments, swapping laptops back and forth to edit at the coffee shop, sending emails and texts and voice notes, asking for ideas and jotting them down to use later, even just talking through a story plot with a trusted ear. This is how I personally write best: in community.

When I’m by myself, crafting anything of substance is daunting. Alone at my desk in my basement bedroom, I stall. I fuss over outlines and research instead of constructing paragraphs. I type “AAAAAHHHHHHH.” I sing whatever song is pumping through my headphones. I click on a tab that takes me away from my Google Doc. I beat myself up for my unproductivity. In such moments, imagining an “ideal reader” who perfectly understands and loves my prose isn’t enough to get my fingers moving across the keys. Instead, I have friends, real-life ideal readers who not only understand and love my prose, but understand and love me; people whose mere presence puts a smile on my face and pulls me out of whatever malaise I may be in. Of course, I do write alone at my desk—especially when I’m on deadline—but whether I’m in the middle of writer’s block or not—though especially when I am—my friends’ support and encouragement make the writing process sweeter and more fulfilling.

I first met L in a workshop we shared during our first year in our MFA program. My feedback letters exalted my love of her writing in all caps, my marginalia effusive with exclamation points. Though our work covered different subject matter in different styles, I sensed a kindred spirit in her words, a fellow critic of the personal. I’m grateful and lucky to have found her friendship, and many others, in my program. MFAs supposedly offer a built-in writing community for those who can afford to attend, though such institutions are hardly welcoming to marginalized students. No amount of emails affirming a commitment to “community values” can ever foster a truly nurturing, sincere, caring space when administrators encourage police and ICE to commit violence against community members who protest genocide.

Long after that workshop, L and I continue to write alongside each other in coffee shops and libraries and bookstores across New York. We plop our books and notebooks and papers and laptops and pens on tables, balancing out the configuration with coffee and pastries. L cracks open a Moleskine to write by hand, and I unload everything in my overstuffed bag onto the table and inevitably knock something to the floor. I solicit L’s advice on how I should construct a scene or shape a sentence, and in turn, I share magazines I think would be good fits for her essays. 

“You should share what you’re working on with me!” I say. “I’d love to read it and edit it for you!” Now that we’re no longer bound by workshop protocol, she tends to demure about sharing her work, saying she’s got more to figure out in the story first. I say I’m always here to help her figure that out if she wants. That’s what friends are for.

Writing through friendship is how Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno create, too. Across various forms and genres, they demonstrate how their friendship shapes their thinking and, subsequently, their writing. Since they live apart, their relationship primarily transpires through emails, which they incorporate into their work. In addition to directly co-authoring a book of criticism on tone, aptly titled Tone, their friendship has forged texts that are as companionable as the two authors, each of which is dedicated to the other: Samatar’s epistolary craft book on writing, Opacities, which is addressed to a friend in the second person, presumably Zambreno, and Zambreno’s hybrid novel/notebook, Drifts, which centers on an autobiographical narrator’s inability to write a novel called Drifts. In Opacities and Drifts, writing and community assume a reciprocal relationship: writing is the act that forges community, and community inspires writing’s enactment; the place where the two writers meet is, of course, the page itself.

Both books are composed of short vignettes—some ranging from a handful of sentences to a few pages—that collect the writers’ various abstract musings about writing. They document their struggles to create, which stem from anxieties over being perceived through their work. Both desire to relinquish themselves as subjects. “Annihilate the self, we wrote to one another,” writes Samatar in Opacities, while in Drifts, the narrator writes to another friend, “Drifts is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing. I desire to be drained of the personal. To not give myself away.” 

As the writers withdraw from public consumption and its perils, they narrow the scope of their readership to each other. The intimacy of their friendship fosters a reparative, generative writing practice through correspondence. Samatar describes writing to friends as “a way to stay alive as a writer,” and replicates Zambreno’s opinion on the subject: “You said it was when you were most a writer: in letters to other writers.” 

It’s no wonder, then, the overlap of ideas the writers express. The same concepts—whether it’s finding freedom in fragmentation, or an obsession with communing with the dead through art, or a frustration with language as an imperfect vessel for intent—are explored in the same conversations replicated in each book, even if Zambreno includes more personal narrative and Samatar keeps it more theoretical. I read Opacities and Drifts only a month apart, and writing this now, I find it difficult to remember which idea is attributed to each author, even when constantly flipping through my copies to track my notes. Within the books themselves, the authors constantly cite each other, making it nearly impossible to disentangle whose thoughts inform what lines. This is what makes their friendship inseparable from their writing. 

Opacities and Drifts distill the writing process of their authors, which includes grappling with the impossibility of perfection. When Zambreno’s narrator bemoans the lack of time and energy to write Drifts in Drifts, I remember my final year of undergrad, where I attended classes four days a week, worked 7-hour retail shifts the other three, and worked another part time job on top of it all, making it unfeasible to produce any new work for my creative thesis. I ended up just submitting old essays instead. When Samatar grapples with her simultaneous fear of and desire to research instead of just write, it reminds me of how, for this essay, I read a reference book and an extra five pieces by the authors to make sure I could, you know, someday, soon, sure, yeah, soon, write the best version of this essay. By commiserating over their paralyses, these problems of writing, Samatar and Zambreno carry on creating in spite of them. Samatar writes, “We exchanged confidences and confidence,” showing how their written exchange—and the friendship it signifies—motivates them to keep going.

That’s what my friends do for me. Sitting across from L, as I am doing now—even though, as I write this paragraph, it is a different day at a different cafe, this one filled with sweet-smelling flowers—makes the act of writing feel more feasible. I can turn to her for support and understanding, and be inspired by her own searing brilliance. “My goal is to write one word,” I told her as we sat down. I’ve been unable to write for days, my mind too flighty, my will too weak, Instagram reels too addicting. First, we rant about a TV show we both watch that’s been canceled. Then, we get to work. 

L is not the only friend I turn to for such community. I see many other friends throughout the week to write, whether I’m working at bookstores with M as she revises her essay collection or at an overpriced vegan cafe in my neighborhood with J as he bangs the keys of a freewriting device. Is there goofing around and socializing and a lot of not writing? Yes. But there’s also accountability and focus. My friends stimulate my thinking in different ways: M with her dreamy and romantic mindset, J with his humor, and L with her affability coupled with a sharp wit and keen artistic perception. They point out new angles on ideas I’ve grown sick of, let me know what’s faltering and succeeding on the page. They are all there for me when I can’t be there for myself. 

Today, L finally shares one of her recent essays with me. I clap in excitement. “I know it’s missing something,” she says preemptively. “But I’m not sure what.” 

“That’s what I’m here for,” I say. Editing is my favorite method of turning community into collaboration. It allows me to maintain my creative instincts while adopting another’s intentions, essentially melding our minds together on the page—much in the same way as Samatar and Zambreno, sans crediting each other directly in the work. I benefit so greatly from being edited. I can never tell what is and isn’t working within my own pages, and being edited exposes me to a fresh perspective and direction—expand here, condense there, build this theme earlier. It’s a catalyst for reflection I can’t access on my own. 

I’ve missed immersing myself in L’s work like this. Reading her essay on reading Toni Cade Bambara in Harlem, I make note of where she can incorporate more research or personal reflection, highlight lines I love, and comment on where I see her establish her main themes. Though I’ve never read Bambara myself, I see my own love of literature reflected in L’s writing, can relate to how art shapes the way we both view the world, even while acknowledging the differences in our perspectives. I hone my skills—my sense of pacing and structure, my aesthetic preferences for language and syntax—through L’s work, and I carry those skills back when I continue working on this essay. Simply put, her words inspire me to write better. Editing—and its cousin, revising—is still writing.

Samatar and Zambreno also forge more expansive definitions of what writing encompasses. In Drifts, the narrator is reassured by Sophia over their mutual lack of writing progress: “I was telling myself today […] that everything is writing, [Sophia] writes me. That reading is writing, taking notes is writing, watching films is writing, copying is writing.” Writing is more than just a singular act—it’s being immersed in the artistic world, being in conversation with other writers, whether that makes it onto the page or not. Essentially, writing is being in community.

That’s what makes writing through friendship so distinct and fulfilling for me: it takes the “failures” of my writing—the distractions, the procrastination, the frustrations at my limitations and circumstances—and turns them into opportunities for connection. It transforms failure from paralysis into something endurable—even pleasurable—in the company of others. It does not eradicate failure, but recontextualizes it as an opening instead of as a roadblock. 

Of course, my friends are not always available to write with me. Satmatar and Zambreno contend with this constantly. Through them, I understand community extends beyond the people directly in front of me to the writers I admire and the work that I connect with. In addition to each other, Samatar and Zambreno cite Rilke, Clarice Lispector, Kafka, Roland Barthes, and many, many others across their pages. In Opacities, Samatar reproduces Zambreno’s opinion on citation: “You, too, you wrote, were fascinated by copyists. There were writers, you said, who wrote through reading. […] Writing of this, the word you used was kinship.” I think of this as kinship—friendship one degree removed; feeling connected to and understood by an author through their text alone. Citation, then, like friendship, becomes another mode of broadening one’s thinking—it becomes another mode of community. It’s also a way, as Samatar writes in an article in Poets and Letters, of revealing oneself: “I’m in the quotations. I am the quotations.” Citation is the self not as an individual, the tidily packaged commodity, but the self as a collective expanse of influence, a mind in constant formation via connectivity, a way of distilling that community into prose. Is that not the self I’m trying to construct right now in this essay? 

Samatar’s and Zambreno’s voices echo in the conversations I have with friends about our artistic struggles, accomplishments, and complaints. In their jointly written Tone, the writers say they were motivated to begin the project based on “a desire for the collective. For the us that is us and beyond us.” Writing alongside L and my other friends, I am both utterly myself and beyond myself, a better person and a better writer, a self I can only become when I’m not just myself, but an us. Right now, as I write this particular sentence, we’re sitting together, L and I, in the basement of a grand, stone library on a rainy Friday afternoon. When I’m done, I’ll show her my laptop and see what she thinks. 

Samatar writes, “That’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.” I feel this charge reading L’s writing, and I try to channel it back into mine. When L reads this essay—and she reads it a few times, in various forms—I know she can feel that charge returned. When she’s done, she looks up from my laptop and says, “I like it.” 

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