Rec: writing meta

I don't know if y'all are following Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer's online writing community. I try to look into it a couple of times a week, but I hadn't really been connecting with it -- for a long time they were chiefly writing about things (like POV) that fandom teaches better than anyone, or things (like goal and motivation) that I've been struggling with for so long that it makes me tired just to read about them.

Today, though, there's a post on something I've never seen discussed: The protagonist's community, and how to build it.

One thing that particularly struck me was the way she stresses involving the reader in the community by starting out with no community, so that the reader is in on it from the start:

That emotional connection is even stronger when the reader reads the creation of the community or the protagonist’s entry into a existing community through the course of the story (”bonds developed over time”), participating vicariously in the struggles of the characters to bond.

I tend to connect most strongly with the characters who are the most lonesome -- not just isolated but longing for connection. (Benton Fraser was the absolute archetypal Res-love in that respect.) So I don't know whether following this advice would make a story moving for everyone, but it would certainly work for me.