Writing from the Garret: The Joys and Dangers of Readership

By Edan Lepucki, The Millions, January 12, 2011

I've been wondering a lot about how sharing one's writing with a larger audience alters one's process--how having multiple readers, a potential world of them, can strengthen that process, and challenge it, and how it can also, if you aren't careful, wound and compromise it.

Edan Lepucki is a staff writer for The Millions. She is a fiction writer and instructor living in Los Angeles, and her stories have been published in Narrative Magazine, Meridian, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, among others.
She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an excerpt of her recently-completed novel, The Book of Deeds, won the 2009 James D. Phelan Award. Her novella, If You're Not Yet Like Me, is out now from Flatmancrooked. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

Read her column here.