Surround yourself with people who support you

When I say "surround yourself with people who support you", I'm not at all being cliché. The fact is that if you're creative in any way, you have to have a good support base - not because you need them to be creative, but because you need to them to help in the creative process, in the editing, in the feedback, in the final polish.

I had a friend who wrote a short novella which he asked me to proof-read and to design a book cover for, and I did. While the story wasn't really my thing, because the author was my friend I felt a responsibility to give him my support by doing both of the tasks he asked me to do (and for free). I wanted his story to be the best it could be - and I made sure my feedback was constructive, pertinent and honest. And he said he really appreciated it - even telling me that I should be an editor because he had really benefited from the feedback and the support I'd given him.

When I asked him to read my story and offer feedback, though...the support wasn't there. Several years ago I'd asked if he just wanted to read it - no need for feedback, I was just excited, like a little kid, and wanted to tell my story. He agreed to read five pages only - and then picked it apart, giving me what he deemed to be constructive criticism. And constructive critique is fine, but it's like advice: if it's given when it hasn't been asked for, it rubs people up the wrong way because it comes across as preachy and has a very strong element of "oh, you poor thing. You don't even know you're doing it all wrong. Here, let me salvage this train wreck for you...". In this case I hadn't asked him for criticism in any way - so perhaps you can imagine my irritation. I got over it, and actually did take some of the advice, which included "don't use so many m-dashes or semi-colons" (it's good feedback).

About a year ago, having proof-read and designed a cover for his work, I sent him mine...and he procrastinated. He had issues with me wanting to protect the security of the file (which I'd worked on for many, many years already at that stage) by having it a non-editable and non-printable pdf; so I changed the letters to shapes and made it editable/printable with a password, again in an effort to protect it should my email be hacked (I don't see myself as a hacking target, but if you create something then you take steps to protect it. That's just prudent). But this wasn't okay, and nor were any of my subsequent efforts to make the process easier - and in the end my "friend" had a go at me, telling me that he wasn't even sure he wanted to help me as I'd been pissed off at him when he'd offered feedback (unasked for) last time and that he didn't want to waste his time or energy. He also (so very kindly) said that I wasn't Stephen King and nobody cared about my writing enough for me to act like it was worth stealing by protecting it with passwords, and basically making it seem as though I had been totally unreasonable to expect him to put aside time to do the same thing I'd already done for him - especially since I just "refuse" to use Word, like 90% of the rest of the world.

I replied, saying that actually my computer didn't come with it built-in and so I'd been using InDesign, a far more intuitive (as far as I'm concerned) and powerful programme to write in, but that I didn't appreciate him finding excuse after excuse to not look at my work - and that I didn't want it to be soured by his attitude towards helping me the same way I'd already helped him, and that I'd now prefer him not to read it, knowing that he clearly found it too great a request of me to make.

He referenced it a few times in subsequent months, first by saying he'd find time, and then by saying he'd give me general feedback, rather than editing suggestions (I'd gone through his story with a fine-toothed comb), and each time I repeated myself that he'd already made it clear he didn't want to proof-read it and that I didn't want him to either anymore. Asking a friend to do something shouldn't be a big deal, but he'd made it into one - and I no longer felt as though our friendship included such elements. I wanted us to drop it, because if we didn't I'd get angry again that the work I'd put into his creative process had not been reciprocated.

Eventually he said it was probably a good thing he didn't proof-read as he'd looked at it and seen that my writing style was a bit "old-fashioned" and didn't flow like modern English, and he wasn't sure what kind of feedback he could offer that would be helpful when that wasn't his usual choice of style. Again, he'd found another reason to not live up to being a decent friend.

More recently he sent me a book he'd read once and thought I'd appreciate - Stephen King's On Writing, which interestingly says in the second foreword that all unnecessary words should be cut out, before (apparently not ironically) advancing to a third foreword. I thanked this "friend" for the book and he said it was partially a guilt gift for him not having read Silverwater. I told him that I didn't want him to feel guilty, but that I appreciated the book. His reply was "You do want me to feel guilty, or you'd let me read Silverwater". At this point I wasn't going to bite, and said definitively "Actually no, that's not about you at all. That's about me and how I feel about it."

And that's really what it boils down to: creativity isn't easy, and if someone's around to help you then excellent - but ultimately if someone is prepared to be there in name only, their involvement in your creative process is of no assistance to you. And it has to be. I am more than willing to assist in some way if I can to someone else's creativity, but ultimately it isn't about me at all - and I wouldn't ever want to make it so with my attitude or with my words. Me helping isn't about exacting payment in some other way, but I do think that as a friend I should be able to give assistance and to ask for it in kind if I ever do need it. That's what friendship is. And frankly, I was too good a friend to this person - and I realised that the moment it became clear to me that the effort I had gone to in order to provide help was not going to be reciprocated, and that rather than him telling me "I can't, I'm sorry", I was told the reason for him failing to help me out was, basically, me. Me telling him in the end that my decision to move on from asking for his assistance was about me and had nothing to do with him or how he felt about his own behaviour was my way of setting my own limits and denying him the ability to have a negative impact on my creativity.

He did try to have that negative impact again, however. After the horrible shootings in an Orlando gay club recently, he messaged me on Whatsapp with an anti-religion message and a link to a CNN article on the events. Rather than agreeing with his divisive, antagonistic stance, I told him that the shootings were the fault of extremism, and that he should be spending his energy mourning the victims rather than opportunistically using it as a soapbox moment to promote his personal crusade against religion (which is actually the subject of his novella. I'll return to this in a moment). Rather than taking a moment to think things through, this "friend" told me that "[I]'m a creep and [I]'ve turned into a real cunt", saying "no wonder [I] don't have any friends", and requesting I not contact him again. When I refused to engage beyond commenting on his behaviour by saying "You're a child", he said "You're a friendless asshole who only feels good about himself by pitting [sic] others down all the time. You really should become a critic, especially since your fiction sucks pretentious ass" - and then blocked me. It was a BIG case of projection, as far as I'm concerned, as I've rarely been baited into yelling matches with him and at all times try to see multiple sides of things. Even in this instance, I can really only guess that he felt me telling him that this wasn't the time to promote an anti-religion agenda was some kind of personal attack on him, when it mentioned noting about him at all. The only time I said anything about him ("You're a child") was after he'd launched himself into calling me names and trying to make me feel bad by making baseless claims about me not having any friends, like we're in a schoolyard playground. After the effort I had gone to in order to be a good friend and to help him create something he could then proudly show the world, not only did he not help me in a similar fashion but the one lasting piece of feedback he wanted to leave me with about my work was that it "sucks pretentious ass". As I said, I was too good a friend to him, and that frustrates me.

What frustrates me more is that the novella he wrote in which Christianity was the antagonist has proven less of an exploration of a concept or an idea and more of a reflection of how he really feels about religion in general - and I don't subscribe to that ideology. I'm not religious, but I'm more open to the notion that other people see the world in ways different to how I see it than I used to be. And it sucks to know that so many people out there are caught up in the antagonism of "us versus them", as demonstrated here. And this is where me being too good a friend comes in again - I designed the book cover for the novella. Knowing that I thought it just a modern interpretation of the underlying ideas behind 1984 but with religion as the antagonist, I didn't feel it was really "my" kind of thing - but I gave constructive feedback on it, and agreed to design the book cover. Looking back I wish I hadn't. Feedback would've been fine, but (unless he reissues it with a new ISBN and a different cover) my name will always be used in association with the project as the designer of the cover. In a way I feel as though that could be taken to mean I endorse the message the project bears, which I don't. As a fictional story it can be taken at face value, but as a piece of the antagonistic rhetoric between different ideologies I feel I should have refused to design anything for it. I suppose I can't really change that now. If there were any decency in this "friend", he'd refuse to use the cover I designed now anyway. Chances are, though, he won't, and my name will forever be found in the small print of the book. I was too good a friend, and I regret that.