My favorite bar to patronize is an empty one. Such a bar is difficult to come across in New York City, but it happens. Despite the countless raucous drunken hours I’ve spent in a thousand types of bars with friends and strangers, I consider bars, in their finest form, to be havens of solitude.

This liminal tension, this inherent contradiction in my relationship with places built for conviviality is echoed in the practice of writing. Being a writer is often assumed to be a solitary task, and indeed much of it is. It’s one of my favorite things about it—the autonomy of it, the needlessness of others in the crafting of ideas, scenes, characters, plotlines; just me, a pen and paper, or a laptop, the world beyond that little reality is absolutely moot during the time I spend in those words. I need no one but myself to accomplish the task at hand. Maybe it’s the nature of being an only child: I’m the one who’ll get something done—who will make decisions, who will take care of a problem, or, say, finish a novel. This is the most comfortable place I can exist: dependent on no one else’s time, talent or favor.

Until it’s not.

Almost everyone who knows me knows I’ve been working on a novel about a dog thief forever. For so long I’m embarrassed to say how long. Suffice to say it’s been so long, anyone could safely assume I’d abandoned the project. And they would not be wrong. I have abandoned it. Then I picked it up again. Then put it aside again. Repeat, ad nauseam. I’ve lost track of exactly how many versions of the manuscript I’ve written but it’s somewhere between 10 and 13. I have gone down narrative rabbit holes that disintegrated the whole story. I’ve gone back to the beginning. I’ve started in the middle. I’ve tried working backwards from what is a pretty strong ending, if I do say so myself. But all these years and my inconstant work have not untangled the fucking thing. The trajectory of my characters has not fully revealed itself to me.

This is when the solitude of being a writer needs to be put aside. When one would turn to friends and fellow writers, hand them the damp clay that is your manuscript and ask them to offer their impressions and their critique. This is when I start being very uncomfortable with the process—for a multitude of reasons. I worry the manuscript is such a mess that no one would be able to make enough sense of it to offer actionable feedback. I worry about intruding on people’s very busy lives. Asking someone to read a work in progress novel manuscript is no small favor; it is time consuming and, depending on the quality of the work, can be deeply tedious. I worry that the feedback will reveal the futility of the undertaking, thus rendering the years of work useless. And, of course, my ego demands a significant amount of anxiety that people will simply not like it.

So, I abandoned the project again. Fuck it. It’s never going to happen. I’ll just be a copywriter for a pharmaceutical advertising agency until I die. Certainly it pays better than being a novelist. I have a 401k and a mostly adult life. Most striving writers who have clung to their creative principles and goals don’t always enjoy such existential security. No need to delusionally continue to chase lifelong dreams of being an author. Clearly it’s a waste of time for me. Others may have that stubbornness, that necessary tenacity in them to persist. I do not.

William Faulkner said, “In writing, you must kill your darlings,” which means no matter how great you think a character, a sentence, a scene, or whatever is, if it’s not serving the story, you must cut it. I’ve always loved the ruthlessness of this sentiment, so when I ran across an editorial service on Twitter called Darling Axe, I looked at their website for about five minutes then decided to query them about the cost of helping me figure out what the fuck was happening with my manuscript. It seemed I wasn’t ready to give it up after all.

I connected with one of their editors, an author and writing coach named Michelle. The quote for her services was not an inconsequential amount of money. So, after working out a payment plan (thankfully), I sent her the manuscript and awaited a stranger’s wisdom about my decade and counting of work. I made the decision quickly, before I could overthink it, before I could talk myself out of it. Before I could contemplate the risk-reward ratio of throwing all that money at a service I didn’t even really know was legit. I reasoned that if nothing else could kick my ass to finish the fucking thing, the idea of that money becoming a sunk cost would help keep me going. I would make it an investment.

MIchelle got back to me a couple weeks later with the note, “Thank you for trusting me with this wonderful novel. It was a joy to work on it. I found myself thinking about it at random moments in my day…These characters feel so real and the scenes so complete—it's really impressive work.”

I had considered myself phlegmatic about the whole project at that point. I’d stopped considering whether it was good or not, I’d even stopped thinking of it as a book. I’d stopped thinking of it as a piece of creativity. I’d stopped thinking of it as what I want my livelihood to be. It was nothing but a never-ending project that dogged me for years with a nagging sense of deficiency. So, when I read Michelle’s words I was taken aback by the overwhelming relief that exploded in my chest, that made me burst into tears.

With her email came a 15-page, single spaced document with detailed, insightful, insanely helpful feedback and observations. As I read those notes I felt my spirit for the story, for the characters springing back to life. I saw in her notes things I’d known but never contended with, things I had never even noticed, and simple solutions to narrative problems I’d always thought were intractable. I saw a path. I sensed the untamed, messy middle—that is currently mostly just contradictions and plot holes—suggesting that it could cohere, that with the right revisions and explorations, my characters could arrive at their rising actions and respective denouements with the grace of story logic.

It had been years and many drafts since anyone besides me had read the thing. I had tacitly decided I would just go it alone. I don’t need anyone. I’m a smart person, I’m a good writer, I can figure this out. The folly of that assumption is appallingly obvious now, and it’s also apparent that approach was convenient in that no one else could hold me accountable to my work. No one was asking how it was going, there was no one i had to lie to about how much work I was (wasn’t) doing. The thing I love about solitude and autonomy is the same thing that makes it unsustainable over the long term: that contentment, that lack of conversation and stimuli, will easily tip over into a sticky inertia. That when you don’t ask for help (even if you pay for it), you’ll never benefit from others’ perspectives and experiences. You’ll never hear the hard things you need to hear to write a better novel, to be a better writer—even to be a better person.

And if you’re not there for the critique, you’re also not there for the praise, for the moment you learn that all your work, all those thousands of hours you spent thinking and writing and writing and thinking, were not useless, were not futile, that your work has a future. Just as long as you’re up to the task of making it happen.