Essential Skills For Writer Friends #AmWriting

Writer friends are special people. They share our passion for writing stories, they have trodden the same creative path as us, they can relate to our writing highs and lows and they also spent their youth getting excited about going to the library and getting English homework at school. They are there for us in the dark times and you know they are only a Twitter, Instagram or Facebook message away.

Here are the essential skills that I believe are required to be a writer friend:

Must be mad about writing and books.Must also be a few tweets away from forming a querying support group on Twitter. Must be fuelled by chocolate, moonlight, caffeine, clothing garments which have pockets and brilliance. Must excel at tweeting thought provoking GIFs about writer problems. Must be a fellow hoarder of beautiful notebooks. Must enjoy the idea of having a ‘creative working lunch’ with their writer, must excel at daydreaming about the intellectual conversations which will take place at the event…but on arrival be happy to just talk nonsense for a couple of hours, have a laugh and forget all about writing.Must be able to make the writer feel better about their crappy first draft by finding lots of faults with other successful best-selling books.Must possess the confidence to tell the writer to ‘get a grip!’ and to ‘pull themselves together when needed.Must be able to pull out the positives from a project, which the writer has admitted is quite possibly the worst thing they have ever written.Must also be juggling far too many things for one person in their life…as well as a serious writing career. Must be able to think on their feet and help the writer get out of a plot hole when called upon.Must be able to talk or message about books for hours and hours and hours…Must be able to quickly get to the root cause of the writer’s literary issue from a simple text which reads ‘chapter thirty-six in my draft is really crap – send help’.Must be able to remain calm when the writer is having a creative tantrum.Must have a big heart.Must not be phased by hearing their writer friend scream, ‘I QUIT WRITING BOOKS!’Must love their writer friend’s characters like they are their own.Must be able to bring some much needed humour to a serious conversation about the writer’s latest attempt at a sex scene.Must also live on a wing and a prayer when it comes to writing. Must have ray of sunlight qualities when their writer friend is in a dark place.

Love our writing friends