I wrote for years, but I never felt like a writer until I started reaching out to other writers and forming friendships with them. Not that you can’t be a writer all by yourself. I’m sure it’s possible, and that such writers exist, but they must be a rare breed.

I’ve written on the subject of community before, as have other bloggers here at the Fictorian Era, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to this foundational concept. It truly is foundational, because I am nowhere without the support, encouragement, and accountability of the people around me.

Perhaps the matter of community speaks to me because my tendency is so strongly toward isolation. I’m not wildly social. I’m usually quite content to spend an evening in, with a good book and roaring fireplace for company. Hell, I don’t need the fireplace, but it sure helps when you live in the cold, dark reaches of the Canadian prairie. So when it comes to finding meaning all on my own… well, I’m practically an expert.

Two and a half years ago, I attended a conference for writers and found myself surrounded by friends with similar ambitions, dreams, and talents. I wouldn’t be writing this blog, or even my current work in progress, if it wasn’t for this feisty band of fellow travellers. Attending that conference required me to take a huge step outside my comfort zone, and most of the steps I’ve taken since have expanded that invisible bubble of succour and security even further. Expansion is constantly on the horizon, because I’m no longer standing still in my writing career; the figurative car I’m driving is a bit of a fixer-up, and the mileage varies (a lot), but the engine runs.

Here at the Fictorian Era, we are a community, and we’re growing all the time. Most of us started unpublished, though this has begun to change. Some of us have found publishers. Others have self-published. All of us are active in our careers, navigating the uncertain waters of the business, and using each other to make tough decisions, keep ourselves accountable, draw inspiration, and build experience. It’s been a gathering place, and it’s kept me on track more times than I can count.

Over the next few months, this blog is going to move forward with more vigor and determination than ever before. We’re pulling together to bring the best, most relevant content on the internet for writers, by writers, and in the process focusing that content more sharply on the topics that matter most to people like us-the craft of writing, the discipline of writing, and the business of writing. We’re combining a myriad of different perspectives and experiences, from the unpublished aspiring novelist to the New York Times bestseller.

If you’re a writer like us, a Fictorian at heart, at any level of skill or accomplishment, we invite you to gather here. Perhaps your writerly engine needs a bit of servicing, a bit of automotive TLC to get roadworthy again. Well, join us. This blog is for you.

I happen to be a voracious reader, as I believe most authors are. While it’s true that my main purpose in reading is for the sheer joy of it, I also learn a lot from other writers. It’s one thing to be able to point to a book and express your appreciation of it; it’s another thing, however, to break it down and be able to analyze the specific things about it that worked so well. The ability to analyze technique is important for any aspiring storytelling.

Over the years, no author has taught me more than George R.R. Martin, through A Song of Ice and Fire. His books are brilliantly conceived and executed on every level. Praise for them is almost universal.

One of the many things I’ve learned from Martin is the art of juggling multiple characters and points of view. The means by which he intertwines his stories requires a deft hand, and over the years I’ve taken note of how he does it. One such method I’ve observed is that even when his characters are divided by entire continents, his novels are held together by powerful overarching themes.

And yet not all readers agree that Martin has successfully managed this aspect of storytelling in the two most recent volumes in his series. After bringing his third novel to the edge of a precipice, his fourth novel has been accused by many fans of being a letdown. Boring. Filler. In fact, if you were to poll Martin’s fanbase, you would probably find that a majority holds this opinion.

So, what happened?

This summer, I dove into a reread of the series. As I was coming to the concluding pages of that dramatic third novel, I came across this, a proposal for combining the fourth and fifth novels of Martin’s series and reading them concurrent with each other. The two books take place at the same time, each of them featuring different sets of characters but both proceeding as direct sequels to Book 3.

I decided to alter my reading plan. Instead of tackling the books separately, I decided to intermix them. Let me just say that my reading experience was educational. In a hundred little ways, it becomes clear that these two books and their disparate storylines were never meant to be disparate at all. They are thematically linked. They play off each other in surprising ways. They inform each other. Together, they form one of the best epic fantasy novels I’ve ever read; separately, they’re serviceable parts of a yet-incomplete whole. In short, there’s nothing boring about them.

To me, this serves as an illustration of the importance of stories complementing each other. Intertwining stories and character arcs is a delicate, sophisticated business, and when you mess with this balance the overall work suffers in ways that can be complicated to pinpoint. A great story is the result of many interlocking pieces.

My current work in progress has six viewpoint characters spread across three or four disparate plotlines (depending on how you count it). In order to shrink my novel to a more manageable length, it was suggested to me that I could extract several storylines and split them into different volumes. I thought about this, then divided the chapters, reorganized the material, and found that while the separate storylines were complete in and of themselves, they weren’t nearly as strong as when taken together.

Incidentally, if you feel the individual storylines in your work in progress could stand on their own two feet without the support of the larger volume, you may want to ask yourself whether or not these storylines are as strong as they could be. Perhaps the more interdependent and symbiotic the various aspects of a novel are, the better. In the future, I know I’ll be using the so-called Martin Effect as a gauge.

One of the things I love about the Fictorians blog is that it offers publishing insights from every possible point of view. Still unpublished and looking for a way to break in? We’ve got you covered. Are you self-published and looking for help marketing and promoting your book? We’ve got a bunch of those. Traditionally published superstars? Check! A big goal of ours is to provide both information and inspiration for writers wherever they are on the publishing track.

Looking back over the last month of posts, I find myself humbled at how far I still have to go and encouraged that there are so many possibilities. Sometimes the publishing world can seem so daunting that it’s hard to keep going, to keep dreaming, but upon honest reflection there’s a lot of really good news mixed in with the bad; the future of publishing is brimming with promise. When I take stock, I realize that there are so many ways to capitalize. The deck may not be stacked in everyone’s favor, but when is it ever? Everyone has to face a tough uphill climb.

As fellow Fictorian Brandon Lindsay wrote on Monday, the statistics make the publishing forecast look more ominous than it really is. If it’s true that the majority of authors are going to fall on their faces, there are probably some factors playing into their failure that you can avoid.

The first factor is quality-and with the market overly flooded (the cloud), good quality is a rarer commodity than ever (silver lining). Whether you’re a prodigious talent or you dedicate yourself to learning the craft, you have a good shot of catching someone’s eye down the road; keep at it and hard work pays off. A platitude? Well, sure. But all the pros, every single one of them, agree on that score, so it has to be more than a mere platitude.

The second factor is ingenuity and perseverance. If you write a lot, constantly improving yourself and building your body of work in anticipation of a future payoff, you’re likely to be rewarded. If you write sparingly and wait around for a lucky break, chances are it’ll never come. Great success comes to those who pursue it the most doggedly. To me, it’s almost an issue of magnetism. I acknowledge that success isn’t inevitable (the world just doesn’t work like that), but it’s more than a long shot if you’re doing everything you can to secure it. Most of the pros I’ve met agree on that one, too.

And who am I to argue with the pros?

When it comes right down to it, of all the possible perspectives I could take on writing and publishing, the rosiest is the pro perspective. They’ve already made it, so they can look back at their careers knowing that all its various components ended in success. If you know that your story ends with success, that makes success inevitable. Well, I’m not there yet, but just for a minute let’s pretend that I am; for now, I choose to view success as inevitable, to see the end of my career from its beginning.

From this perspective, the road forward doesn’t look so bad at all.