Winter is the time of year when I think about entrainment. Entrainment, as it pertains to the writer's life, is the art and science of learning by proximity to writers who are working at a higher level than you. It's skill by osmosis, by community. For me, it's an absolute necessity.
Why? Because we only know what we know. We reinvent ourselves over and over, unconsciously, until we entrain with something moving at a higher skill level.