“Is the writing process fundamentally lonely?” is a question Lex Fridman asked Steven Pressfield in an interview. I loved his answer:
No, because you’re with your characters. […] My desk used to face the wall, and people would say: Don’t you want to look out the window?” But I’m in here, I’m seeing the spartans. The characters that you create are not accidents. They are coming out of some deep issue you have, they’re fascinating to you.
— Steven Pressfield
It’s not lonely at all. In fact, I’m more lonley sometimes later going out to dinner with some people and actually talking with people.
There’s something magical about writing where when you’re really immersed in a story, the characters come alive and become part of your world just as much as you become part of their world.
Plus, there are really many ways to write a story.
I remember Chuck Palahniuk talking about his writing process once, which in fact was reliant on interacting with other people. He talked about how he would go to the gym and bounce story ideas of people there to see how they’d react, what would get them hooked, what would bore them.