Writers are constantly scrambling towards the common ground of validation. For example, this weekend I’m attending a writing conference where we are getting feedback on the pitches for our novels. (obsessed with writing conferences lately, see related post here) You can picture it like a workshop for door-to-door sales, but the speech ends with a thoughtfully crafted Central Dramatic Question instead of an offer for a magazine subscription. Pitches are a finicky and endlessly important part of novel writing. (In fact, one of the great ironies of writing is that you spend half of your time locked in a room alone, scribbling in notebooks and mumbling to imaginary people. Then,…