I was having a text conversation today with another writer about certain frustrations and remembered a zoom conversation with a couple of writer friends in Scotland and realized what I miss the most about not getting together with some of my writing buddies...
All of us work differently. Pantsers-plotters, verbose-terse, dialogue driven-description driven. Each one of us vastly different in our styles, patterns and genres.
Yet none of us has ever said the other person was wrong about how they wrote, how they processed or how they thought. None of that happened.
We talked about killing off characters, introducing new ones and when was a good time. There was talk of someone's story being longer while another person thought it could sustain being shorter and not one of us said the other was wrong. One of the writers has been professionally making their living writing for about 30 years each, one of them only about 5 years. Me, somewhere in between.
What struck me, and maybe it's because we're all stuck inside, was the fact that we all accepted how others worked and never tried to force our way of working as the better way, we listened, we discussed, we presented our thought and ultimately we left the decisions up to the person asking a question.
I miss kicking back with buddies for conversations like that. No judgements, no picking each other apart. Just good ol' acceptance of differences.