On the social skills of writers

I've known many writers who are shy and not very good in social gatherings. However, I don't think you can build a generalization on this. Many writers are the life of the party. Look at the opening of Capote, with the writer holding court. Of course, often this is a performance. I'm shy and often lonely, yet in my days of holding court in barrooms, one would have called me the center of attention and the life of the party. It was a performance, an act.

A generalization I do believe in, however, is that social situations can be dangerous to a writer because the same energy needed for creation can be dissipated socially. My late soul brother Dick, for example, wanted to be a writer when I met him. What happened, I learned, was that he became an oral storyteller instead. He told all his stories in social situations and had no energy or desire left to put them down on paper. I've met other "wanna-be writers" who are this way. Consequently I'm very guarded about what I reveal about my work in social environments. I avoid talking about what I'm working on because I fear I can talk myself out of writing. I believe writing absolutely must be a solitary act early on, though refining an idea can benefit from informed chat; but once the writer starts to write, s/he must be alone. Later, with a draft, the process can have a social element once again. But writing is not a committee project at an essential stage of creation.

I also think feeling alone is part of the human condition. Connections are blessed exceptions, not the norm. Writers and artists perhaps focus on their feelings of loneliness more than others because their interior lives are necessarily very intense. I reached the point where I consider myself my best company, which translates into a preference for being alone to standing in a crowd at a party wondering why I'm there. I liked parties in my drinking days but later I discovered I liked the liquor more than the people. Take away the liquor, and I'd as soon be left to myself.

At the same time, I've been blessed with a few very intimate friends, whose company I cherished. Unfortunately I outlived them.

I don't know what to tell a writer who worries about a lack of social skills. I think one grows to accept whatever skills one has. I don't think an artist should go out of the way to learn social skills and to become a social animal. I don't think that's the artist's calling. The interior life is more important than the exterior life -- indeed, this is the great conflict in many artist's lives, how to balance the two. If you abandon your interior life or sacrifice it for social benefits, you mess with your bread and potatoes, so to speak. Everything has its price, including living a life in which much energy is devoted to discovering, understanding, and building stories based on one's interior life. Writing when taken most seriously is an existential act.