To Be (Or Not To Be) A Writer On Twitter
In the decade-plus of the exploding (and occasionally imploding) Twittersphere, I’ve managed to remain aware yet willfully and blissfully unengaged. Non, je ne regrette rien; I have come to relish the JOMO. Of course, by no means am I trying to pass myself off as some morally superior Luddite. I’m still on Facebook, posting cat pictures and lurking on people from high school just like anyone else. I wouldn’t have been able to build my former business and its loyal community without Instagram. And well, here I am, continuing to shout into the void across multiple publishing platforms. But I just CAN’T with Twitter. I just can’t.
I didn’t always feel this way. In fact, I was an early-adopter. A Twitter-vangelist, even. Sometime in 2008, I inaugurated myself as my company’s social media strategist. Management wasn’t convinced that I should make it my full-time remit, so it was entirely a side-gig labor of love. Which is to say, entirely uncompensated. Nevertheless, I was glued to my whirring Tweetdeck mission control, keeping my finger on the pulse of the landscape of competitor agencies, posting quotes from Fast Company articles, and bantering with the emerging thought leaders of the time. I’d live-tweet and hashtag the hell out of local digital marketing events. Clients willingly submitted to the proselytizing zeal with which I implored them to establish a brand presence on the platform. (Yeah, sorry ‘bout that.)
Being thirty-one, I would’ve been too old for this job by today’s standards. But at the time, and even with a decade of OG dotcom experience already under my belt, I was still young enough to be way more in touch with emerging tech than my old-media bosses. Eventually, though, leaders copped on to the business value of social media. And then it wasn’t long before job postings with highly cringe-worthy titles that included words like ‘guru’ or ‘ninja’ became among the most desirable and lucrative, and corporate social media strategy was elevated to a high art. That’s about when my irrepressible Gen X cynicism and I took it as our cue to move on and never look back.
But, sigh, now I find myself in the humbling position of needing to build an audience for my writing online. Even though I’m just starting out (or, I guess, restarting), I already feel distinctly on the back foot. It’s been three months since opening a new Twitter account and I have just over thirty followers, 99% of whom are recent mercy-follows from my writing program. I have no idea WTF I’m doing, how to do it, or if I even really need to anyway.
My resistance to return to what’s openly regarded as a soul-destroying wasteland of smouldering garbage-fires doesn’t need much explanation. I’m pretty sure that rule number one of being on Twitter is that you must hate being on Twitter. The whole platform feels charged with an undercurrent of disdain and resentment. And yet. Two of the year’s most thinkpiece-generating and quote-tweeted books, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, are evidence that a kind of Stockholm Syndrome has taken hold among the ‘extremely online’, especially, maybe even particularly in so-called literary Twitter. Lockwood’s protagonist is made famous on the back of a single, banal tweet (“Can a dog be twins?”). Oyler’s narrator operates at such a high level of self-parody of her own infamously caustic online persona that it feels like we’re meant to read the novel itself as an ironically auto-fictional ‘fake account.’ Still, neither author can seem to resist going back to the well, sucked in by the ever-downward scroll.
I get that to be successful, you need to be present and you need to engage with people. What I don’t get is when I’m supposed to be on Twitter. Or how often I’m supposed to be tweeting. Because it sure seems like the answer is ALWAYS. But I’m not someone who’s tethered to their phone all day and night. In fact, I’m spending less time online than ever. I mean, I have all this writing to do and all these books to read and all this life to live. Susan Sontag was known to read for eight hours a day, and as a writer was insanely prolific in both her journals and published works. I’m certainly not comparing myself to her by any stretch, but even to realize only my dimmest aspirations as a writer, how could I justify sacrificing an hour of precious time to scrolling?
I don’t know. Maybe I’m protesting too much. Writing can be lonely, the highs and lows emotionally destabilizing, and overall it’s a pretty bad bet for earning a living wage. Twitter at least provides a community of peers as a support group as much as it does a time-erasing distraction from anxiety of the blank page. So I’ll allow that there’s some utility and perhaps occasionally some good will in participating. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?
It’s not that I feel too old, or that I can’t come up with clever things to say or find the absolutely deadliest reaction GIF. (Anyway, this is the only GIF I’ll ever need.) I guess I just don’t know where to start. It’s overwhelming and I don’t know how to make my own space in the crowd without feeling like I need to have my defenses up and my elbows out. I don’t want any of Twitter’s oozing toxicity to seep into my bloodstream and be sweated out as snark. I don’t want my cockeyed optimism to be ensnared in a doom spiral, or for my earnestness to be poisoned by irony. I’m not fragile, but I am protective of my time and my sanity. Twitter doesn’t really feel like a safe space for kindness anymore (if it ever was), and the last thing I want to do is have to hire some social media ninja to have my back.
But my biggest issue is that no matter what, it will always feel like a zero-sum game. At the same time writers are meant to be, uh, writing, they’re also supposed to be out there racking up a follower count, forced to engage in a brutal, cliquish Hunger Games of attention and validation. “Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?”, asks Lockwood’s narrator, and I really have to wonder, because life is short, and I have so much more I want to write. Maybe I should just focus on that instead of worrying about who’s going to read it. Messages always find a way to reach those who need to hear them, even if it turns out you’re talking to yourself.