Five Writers, Five Hours, Zero Words Written, and Every Damn One of Them Mattered

Last night I sat in my room with four other writers glowing in little boxes on my screen for five hours.

We did not open a Google Doc. We did not touch a pen. Not a single notebook saw the light of God.

And it was, without question, one of the best writing workshops I have ever attended.

I know. I know. You are reading this thinking, Ramon, that is not a workshop. That is a group chat with extra steps. But hear me out, because you are wrong, and I am about to tell you why.

We were supposed to write. The prompt was ready. The timer was cued. The Zoom link was live and waiting because we were in the flesh, except we were not. We were pixels and bad lighting, gathered like a coven of wordsmiths who had every intention of being productive. And then someone unmuted and said something about a text they received. Then someone else brought up a relationship that ended like a car crash in slow motion. Then the roast began. Then we were off.

Five writers. Five hours. Zero pages produced.

And yet.

We talked about what men endure in silence. What women navigate in plain sight. The good, the bad, and the outright indecent. Yes, we discussed dick pics. Not as a joke, but as a cultural phenomenon. As evidence. As the unsolicited thesis statement of modern courtship. We laughed until our ribs hurt. We read poems aloud not to workshop them, but to say, This is what got me through the week. We celebrated each other not for what we produced, but for what we survived.

This is what community looks like when it is real.

We have been sold this lie that writing is a solitary act of suffering. That the muse only visits when you are alone in a room, bleeding into a keyboard, chasing some word count like it owes you money. That if you are not producing, you are not a writer. That if you are not publishing, you are not serious.

Bullshit.

Sometimes the most important work a writer does is staring into a camera and saying, I see you. I hear you. Your struggle is not foreign to me.

Inspiration does not always arrive as a lightning bolt while you are staring at a blank screen. Sometimes it sidles up to you at two in the morning while you are arguing about whether love is a choice or a condition. Sometimes it hides inside a roast so sharp it draws blood, because that roast means someone is paying attention. Sometimes it lives in the five-hour call where no one checks their phone because the energy in the grid is too thick, too necessary, too alive to interrupt.

We need these hangouts. We need these unstructured, unproductive, gloriously messy gatherings where the only agenda is honesty. Because writing does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in the context of lives being lived. It happens after you have been seen. It happens when you remember that you are not the only one fighting the blank page, the rejection letter, the imposter syndrome, the ex who still haunts your drafts.

The poems will wait. They always do. They are patient bastards. They know you will return to them with fuller lungs and steadier hands.

So if you are a writer reading this, and you have been beating yourself up because you did not write this week, let me offer you permission you do not need but might want anyway: go call your people. Go start a call where the connection is spotty and someone’s camera keeps freezing and the conversation is too loud. Go roast and be roasted. Go talk about the indecent things. Go be unproductive on purpose.

That is where the work actually begins. Not on the page. In the call. In the trust. In the five-hour hangout that produces nothing except the feeling that you are not alone in this.

And that, my friends, is the most important sentence you will write all year.

Now go text your writing group. Send the Zoom link. Tell them you are not writing tonight. Tell them Ramon said it counts.

Because it does.

Ramon Carty

Editor, The Root System Review