Why Every Writer Needs a Support Team
For a long time, it felt natural to treat writing as a solo pursuit that relied entirely on personal discipline and persistence. If I’m completely honest, I also enjoyed it this way. It was my slice of quiet away from the pressures of daily life, where I could sit with a coffee and play around with words until everything fell into place and felt just right.
This assumption made sense on the surface. Writing looks solitary from the outside. Most of the work happens behind closed doors, inside your own head, without the visible structure that comes with a team environment.
At the time, this approach felt right, even if it went against everything I had learned elsewhere.
The other part of my life was sport. As an international archer, I lived and trained full-time at the High-Performance National Sports Centre, where the idea of working in isolation did not exist. Even in an individual sport like mine, you are never operating alone. Behind every performance is a group of people shaping, challenging and refining what you do.
This environment taught me a few things that I did not immediately carry across into writing.
The first was that nobody achieves on their own. I never wanted to be the most knowledgeable person in the room, and I actively sought out people with more experience, sharper insights and different perspectives because that was where growth happened. Being challenged was part of the process rather than something to be avoided.
The second was that progress is not something you keep to yourself. In sport, everything is visible. Performances are analysed, broken down and discussed. Even after breaking a world record, the focus shifted straight back to understanding what worked well and where there was still room to improve.
The third was that support is not passive. Instead, it’s built through consistent interaction, shared effort and a genuine investment in each other’s progress. The best environments are not just focused on performance, but built on people who care enough to notice, to challenge and to push things forward.
When I moved into writing, I left all of this behind without realising it.
I leaned into the insular nature of the process, keeping my work to myself and treating it as something I needed to figure out alone. Part of this was because I still saw writing as my ‘quiet time’, but mostly it was because I did not know where to find the right people or what support could actually look like.
It took time to recognise that writing and sport are not as different as they seem. Both require consistency, both involve long periods of uncertainty, and both improve significantly when you introduce the right kind of external perspective.
Before the launch of my second book, I was invited to join a private writing network by a fellow author, and it changed my experience completely. Being surrounded by people navigating similar challenges, even when they’re at different stages or writing for different genres or age groups, created a level of clarity that I had not been able to achieve on my own.
What stood out most was not just the practical side of it, but the way it changed how the process felt. Writing no longer existed in isolation. There were people who noticed my progress, acknowledged it, and actively supported it, whether through conversations, encouragement, or sharing my work more widely.
If you are looking to build that kind of support around your own writing, there are a few things that have made a real difference for me.
Get involved in author networks: Whether this is a formal group or a smaller, informal circle, being connected to other writers introduces perspective and encouragement that is difficult to replicate on your own.
Don’t be a passive observer: The real power of these communities comes from how actively you choose to engage. Comment on other people’s work, join conversations and show up consistently. Connection is built over time, and it only happens if you take part.
Share your journey, not just your outcomes: Talk about what you are working on, what you are learning and what you are figuring out. This creates space for others to relate, respond and support you along the way.
Celebrate other writers properly: Support is built through small, genuine interactions over time. Acknowledging someone’s progress or sharing their work contributes to a culture where people want to show up for each other.
Be consistent with your presence: You don’t need to be everywhere, but you do need to show up regularly. Connection is built through repetition, not occasional visibility.
Build relationships, not transactions: Focus on getting to know people and contributing to the space, rather than approaching it with the mindset of what you can get from it.
Support networks are not built overnight, and they are not built passively. The more consistently you show up and invest in other people, the more naturally that support comes back to you over time.
Writing may begin as an individual pursuit, but it becomes far more effective, and far more rewarding, when you build the right team around you.
