Solitude

I am comfortable being by myself. Most writers that I know do. It is hard to write in a crowd although it can be done. Many writers write in cafes and everyone remembers seeing people with their laptops in coffee shops and the like. I don't know if they are writers but there was this coffee shop that had a number of writers who would bring their laptops in and write. After a while the management of the cafe tried to get rid of them and did succeed although some of the writers were well known. They went under because no one else came to their coffee shop. I was one of them and I always bought coffee and what snacks I could eat. I did not bring my laptop but a notebook. I really got mad at them although it was later that I began to see another side to the argument that I did not consider then.

People are a social group and love being with other people and distrust any group of people who are not like they are. Writers are not the only ones who prefer to do something in solitude. Another group and they are related are readers. They like to read books and one sees them in stores with their cups of coffee and Barnes and Noble are often full of them which is very reasonable. Writers are loners or at least some are as readers often are. You have to be in order to do the kind of work you yearn to do. In biographies of writers, they also tend to take long walks by themselves. That is darn close to radical. There are other loners such as scientists and others too numerous to mention here, but as a group, the ones who are social outnumber the ones who are not.

Some of the problems I have had with friends is they like to spend long hours watching television and they like company doing this. I can't stand it. It drives me up a wall. I suppose it drives them up a wall when I am sitting there reading a book or writing on a computer. I have read an essay or two over the years and even a book, "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto" by
Anneli Rufus. It is a celebration of solitude. It doesn't change the fact that many people are afraid of being alone. Writers, as a rule, are not.

People working in that coffee shop looked at their customers lost in their own world, peering into their laptops or engrossed in their notebooks, it frightened them or made them feel rejected. It made them feel left out. In the movie, "Looking for Neverland ", the creator of Peter Pan has a wife who gets a lover on the side because she feels left out of her husband's world. She tells him that she expected to be a fellow traveler in his creative journeys but couldn't. In a interview with Phillip Glass, the real life wife of Glass says the same thing. She has her young children but feels left out of the world her husband has created.

Writers, artists, poets, composers travel in wonderful worlds of the imagination but they travel alone although what they create can be shared by their readers, listeners, followers. When the writers were sitting at their tables, they can't share where they are going except in rare exceptions with their writing partners and others feel left out. I am guessing here. But I remember the anger of my own partners in the past when I was working and they just stood there and wanted to know why they could not be a part of what I was doing. It never occurred to me that anyone did not have their own world to occupy. Poor muggles.( I will always be grateful to J.K. Rowland for this insight.)

W. Somerset Maugham said that writers have the best job in the world. I agree, but until I had a steady income from other sources I did not enjoy writing as much as I do now. I don't have to depend on the steady supply of sales from my writing. If I sell, great and if I don't, that is ok too.
Part of writing involves reading which is a very nice part of writing. I read what I write and I read other writers. That is fun too, but is all done in solitude.