Lee Stringer on the value of literary friendship

This is not a science. We’re not making porcelain. We’re not cutting two-by-fours. It’s kind of crazy stuff to just sit in a room and click away at a—in my case, if you’ll forgive me, a Mac—for eight or nine hours. It is a very unnatural thing to do. And there’s no one there to tell you whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. It’s a very scary thing, to spend a year or so doing that. And the real fear is that you’ll look back and say, “Gee I’ve wasted a year doing nothing.” So in the midst of that loneliness to have another writer say, “You know, you did all right,” is a great thing.

—Lee Stringer, in Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing