Someone to lean on

Reminder: we're taking a short break from our series on textual analysis for a couple of months over the end-of-year holiday period. The series will restart in January.

The day this post goes out is my 11th wedding anniversary, and that's got me thinking about how important it has been for my wife and I to support each other in different ways over the years. A lot of this support has been in the realm of the mundane and practical, but we've also encouraged each other in our respective writing-related pursuits, which leads me into the topic I want to focus on in this article (you probably aren't here to learn about our meal planning system, after all).

Writing is a complex thing, and although it's easy for writers to retreat into themselves and become isolated it's actually really, really difficult to do everything ourselves, if such a thing is even possible. There are a lot of places where we can benefit a lot from involving other people in our process, and plenty more ways that we can be helped that aren't actually particular to writing. This seems like a good time of year to think about the people who help us to create, and the ways we provide support to others; perhaps it's a good time to acknowledge our support network personally as well.