Inspired by my latest post Don’t Miss Your life and by Kristen Lamb‘s passionate encouragement of communication between writers.

Don’t get me wrong. Communication is important for everyone, regardless of your profession, lifestyle, and whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. That’s right. Even we introverts need to give in and accept that communicating with others is an important part of our life.

What kind of communication, you may ask?

Speaking, online and offline, visual contact, online and offline, forming friendships, online and offline. Overall, we just need to have actual contact with other human beings! Yes, we introverts might be perfectly happy living alone with our cats. Maybe a dog, should we dare to leave the house for more than getting groceries and going to bookstores or the library.

Now that we’ve established that writers need communication just as much as any other person does, let’s take a look at the reason why communication is so important for us.

• Inspiration

Yep. As anyone who has contact with a writer will probably know, we writers will gladly use our friends and family as source material for our current and upcoming projects. You actually broke up that way? How horrible!

Don’t be surprised to find uncanny similarities between your life and the life of a character in that draft your friend just asked you to beta-read. We don’t do it to hurt you, honest. Writers are like sponges. We soak up everything we see and hear and morph it until it fits in our stories. We might not remember how we came up with that amazing idea, but it worked out in the long run!

• Health

Believe it or not, but communicating with other people is healthy – even for writers. We sit in our house all day, typing away on a keyboard or scribbling frantically into a notebook. Maybe even loose scraps of paper if we’re really unorganized. Trust me, it’s possible.

Going outside and having a chat with some friends and family is an excellent way for us to stay sane. After all, knowing our characters, do we really want them to break farther into our mind than they already have? I’ve got some psychos in my books. The last thing I need is them talking to me more than they do now.

Imaginary people don’t talk to me. Honest.

• Fun
  

  Action-packed things, no less!
  Panic! At the Disco concert on August 19th, 2011.

Unexpected, I know. This is the reason so many people forget about. Yes, contact with others increases our inspiration and therefore helps our productivity, and yes, having someone to talk to is a healthy way for us to prevent psychopathic antagonists from taking over our brains stay sane and distance ourselves from our work a bit, but how can we forget the most important thing about social contact?

We want to have fun.

There’s nothing greater than spending time with some friends. Head to the cinema or the theater, go out to dinner, go to the arcade. Go do something that’s fun and will help you take a break from all that work you do day in and day out – because writers never stop working; we’re always thinking – and just relax. Have fun. No matter how much work you have to do, never forget to have fun.

Without fun, would any of this really be worth it?

Go ahead and share your opinion in the comments! I’d love to hear what you think. And remember, take it easy and give yourself a break now and then, regardless of how busy you are. Tell work to wait and go enjoy yourself!

Have fun with friends and ignore the alluring voices enjoy life to its fullest!

That’s all for now. Let me know what you think and stay tuned for next time!