Last night I went out with my good friend and fellow writer Nina Merrill. We ended up at a hole-in-the-mall (ha ha) Mexican restaurant where we often go to wank about writing. They know us there, and let us stay a bit after closing, me drinking wine and Baileys-and-coffee, Nina drinking glass after glass of water to wash down arroz con pollo.

As usual, the conversation ranged everywhere, from dirt about presses and submission policies to characters (but I wouldn’t want to speak for them, we usually add when talking about characters, an in-joke delivered with rolling eyes and sarcastic lip-twitches, followed by dissolves into laughter) and any other aspect of writing or publishing you can name. How to write good smut. The five things that make a good action sequence. Passive verbs. Editing for continuity. Whether it’s masturbatory to read your own work. Method-acting for characters, and how to deal with those characters being bad or broken people.

It is a wonderful thing to find a fellow writer one can wangst with. Other careers have non-inflammatory professional associations built in, both official and personal. The trouble with being a writer is that so many professional and personal relationships, when it comes to writing, are marred by ego.

I realize breaking silence about this particular dynamic might earn me a little flak. That’s okay.

Writing is such a personal art, and submitting one’s work fraught with so much emotional peril, that there can hardly help but be social land mines when one meets another writer. The most common dynamic I see is professional jealousy–how dare you be successful when I’m still getting rejected? Which is quite a natural and normal thing to feel. Envy isn’t a sin, it’s a spur to write better. Or at least, it should be.

But with writers, envy seems to cut much deeper. We are capable of florid hothouse flowers of exotic jealousy. (We are certainly not boring.) For every tale I have about deep abiding friendships between writers, I have three about rivalries, one-upmanship, and just generally petty wrangling. The worst I’ve seen is at conventions, especially on panels–my God, the behavior sometimes reaches the absurd. I watch it happen in real life and think, nobody would believe this in a book.

The hard sell can sometimes be a function of this jealousy, but more often it takes the form of carnivorous friendships or relationships.

For an example, let’s look at a fictional character who exhibits the worst of these behaviors. We’ll call this being Author Y. You meet Author Y, and s/he seems nice enough. There’s a few going-out-to-coffees, which turn into lunches and dinners. You see this person at conventions and say hello, but after a while you start to realize a few things.

* Author Y doesn’t pay much attention to you unless there’s something you can give him, whether it’s writing advice or a possible link to a editor/publisher.

* Author Y spreads tidbits of personal/writing information about you. She just can’t sit on something that might be considered scuttlebutt, she has to spread it to the four winds.

* Author Y uses you to get close to celebrity writers of your acquaintance, or editors/publishers you may know. Once Author Y is “friends” with a celebrity, you are suddenly chopped liver.

* Author Y will drop you like a used Kleenex as soon as he finds someone “better.”

* Author Y offers all sorts of help to you if you’re just starting out…but the minute you make an actual sale or your perceived success passes hers, she suddenly turns cold and critical.

There’s more, but I’m sure you can fill it in for yourself. These are the major ones I’ve seen in my (admittedly short) time in the publishing biz. Of all of them, the last is the most hurtful. There’s nothing quite like thinking you’re friends with a fellow writer, and can share hours of deep involved conversation about this thing that means so much to you, and then…suddenly getting knifed in the back in one way or another. It can send a new writer, or a newly-published one, into a tailspin of pain and second-guessing.

As you can no doubt guess, I’ve had some experience with this. Once my first title was actually published (on PAPER! and you could buy it at a BOOKSTORE!) there was a great shake-up in my personal life. People I thought I could count on suddenly started saying hurtful things and cutting me out of their lives. Other people, who I hadn’t thought of as great friends, were suddenly underfoot anywhere–and I was having a hard time fulfilling their sudden emotional demands. I thought I was losing my mind. I seriously considered some kind of therapy until my Dear Husband Muffin sat me down and said, “Sweetheart…it’s not you. Well, a little bit of it is you, but no more than normal. It’s that you’ve done it. That’s threatening to people who think they’re in a race with you.”

The funny thing is, I never considered it a race. I still don’t.

When I was Struggling Writer, it was safe for some “friends” to support me with little to no ego cost. When I became Published, (the capitalizations here are EXTREMELY tongue-in-cheek) I was suddenly a Threat to someone’s ego–someone who “wished they could write” and would someday “write a novel.” Or someone who had published and suddenly found my success–small as it was–looming like an elephant in the living room.

Extensions of this dynamic appear everywhere in the publishing world. It isn’t just simple jealousy. Rather, it’s the triggering of deep self-esteem issues, which no writer I’ve ever met is without. When your creative output is judged by rejection slips and sales numbers, it’s hard not to have a wee self-esteem issue. Writers get it from both ends, living with characters in their heads and having to please editors, publishers, readers, the general public, AND other writers in order to get read/get some validation. The wonder is that we’re not BIGGER balls of quivering bare nerve endings.

The flip side of this is that you get to know who your real friends are. They are the Writer Zs.

* Writer Z is just as happy for your success as she is for her own. She is not threatened by your success–she views it as a result of your hard work and celebrates it with you. (This is by far the most important characteristic of a good friend.)

* Writer Z does not spread details of your writing difficulties/personal difficulties/angst over revisions.

* Writer Z will tell you when she can recommend you to an editor. She will also tell you when an editor won’t be interested in your stuff–and she’ll do it tactfully, by emphasizing the positive.

* Writer Z understands “celebrity” writers put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. This does not keep him from squeeing like a fanboy, but it does mean his squee is well-controlled–and he does not treat you like a key to gain entrance to a certain author’s inner circle.

Basically, Writer Z is a good friend, where Author Y is…not. There are good friends and not-so-good friends in every area of human social endeavor, but for some reason the publiushing industry just tends to put the blood in the water, so to speak. There are far many more Ys than Zs. The best way to find the Zs is to be one, and to be on the lookout for other Zs. There are Ys who initially look like Zs, but Zs rarely initially look like Ys. Hold on to your Zs and treat them well, for they are the friends you want and need for a long, long time.

Getting published and reaching other career milestones will change the power dynamics in some of your professional relationships to the extent that the Ys are compelled to reveal themselves. Sometimes only time will reveal a Y. Sometimes you may decide to stay friends with a Y or someone with Y tendencies, for a variety of reasons. But do not let your ego get tangled up in what a Y thinks of you, and NEVER mistake a Z for a Y. A Z will tell you when you’re frocking up, kindly and honestly. A Y may also tell you when you’re frocking up, but s/he will do it to hurt you instead of help you.

Again, the best way to find Zs is to be one. Be as happy over your friends’ success as you are over your own–happier, in fact. We often fall into the trap of thinking there’s only so much success to go round. That type of thinking breeds Y behavior like dampness and spores breed mushrooms. It’s a zero-sum game, which always ends with a loser. It’s far more emotionally satisfying to be a Z and have a non-zero-sum game where there’s abundance to go ’round and good friends to share it with.

Just call me an optimist. Oh, and for the record? Nina’s a Z. I wouldn’t want her any other way. And I try to be a Z too.