No way was I doing Twitter. Twitter was a spam-fest. A cross-hatched mess. It went against my whole philosophy. Except…
“Reddit killed your blog,” my husband said. “Why would you not want to rebuild your readership? It might help you promote your new novel.”
The words “killed your blog” cut deep, though they were only partly true. The media hub Reddit had sent my blog views into the stratosphere for a short time. Each post had attracted thousands of views and heaps of praise.
Reveling in my 15 minutes of fame, I had almost forgotten the original purpose of my blog: to sell my books; to build interest in my new but, as yet, unpublished novel.
The fun ended abruptly. I was expelled from Reddit for posting only my own work, an unwritten crime I had not known about, and now only had about 20 regular readers for my blog, instead of the thousands per post I was used to.
“Ten tweets a day, more is better,” my social media friends advised. “If you want to build a platform and impress an agent to publish your novel, and get people reading your blog again, you need to tweet, tons of tweets, every day.”
Not fair. Writing was what I loved, and how I wanted to spend most of my time. Real writing, not spam. If I had any talent for advertising, I would have gone into sales. Whatever happened to writers writing?
Or – for that matter – the days when “social media” was just “media?”
But I did miss the Reddit traffic, the encouragement, the swooning bliss of being told I had inspired readers. I took a cautious peek at my Twitter feed, composed of about 20 people, from an account I had started a couple of years back.
I found a jumbled mess of mental jetsam crammed with pound symbols, nothing like the idealistic descriptions of Twitter as “micro-blogging,” in which writers who had things to say said them.
As I often do when feeling snarky, I wrote a comic strip in my head: “Young Shakespeare in the year 2013.” It went like this:
Shakespeare at eight: “But Mum! I want to write couplets and quatrains about the majesty of love, the power of desire, and the doleful brevity of life.”
Mother: “Eat your cabbage and shush! What do you think writing is, a game of tiddlywinks? Do you want to be a no-account loser all your life? You do your Twitter, and you do your Twitter now! I want to see hashtags. Mountains of hashtags!”
“I hate Twitter,” I complained to my husband.
“Everyone hates Twitter,” he said.
“Then why does anyone do it?”
He took a deep breath. “Twitter is meaningless. A video game, really. But if you have lots of followers, that will impress agents who think Twitter means something.”
It seemed wrong, all wrong. I had spent most of my life getting to the point where I loved to write and no longer had to force myself to do it. I wanted to write novels.
But my blog readership was standing still. I spent as much as 8 hours on some posts, sometimes more, to get them right. I wanted to share them. My expulsion from Reddit made me feel like I had been exiled to a remote and uninhabited island.
I needed a boat, a raft, a hot air balloon. Something. But, for now, there was Twitter. Even if it was only driftwood.
Okay. I would do it. But if Twitter was going to take time away from my writing, I had to first find its intrinsic value.
I was all about intrinsic value. Whenever I had been really successful at anything, it was because I found a way to enjoy doing it. In school I could make an A in a subject only if I became genuinely interested in it. Nothing was boring. I only had to find a personal frame of reference, a connection to make it relevant.
But what was relevant about Twitter? I looked at my Twitter feed again, the nonsensical fragments, along with ads for breast enlargement supplements and promises of “spiritual healing.” Some tweets were nothing but hashtags. Twitter appeared to be a strike against my “nothing is boring” theory.
After a long struggle, I made a decision. I would treat tweeting as a writing challenge, as an exercise in brevity. Succinctness was a good writing habit in both poetry and prose, yielding bromides such as “brevity is the soul of wit.”
Rather than erect virtual billboards, I would treat Twitter as a mini-journal. I would record observations: how the rain puddles looked outside my window, musings, dreams, wishes, or observations of absurdity.
I began filling the small boxes of space, carefully editing my text and rearranging words. At first, no one responded, my thoughts dissipating in the airless void of cyberspace. But that was okay. I was writing. I was having fun. Which meant that, intrinsically at least, Twitter was not a waste of time.
Meanwhile, I followed scores of people. I got addicted to the sound of my Android phone chirping with follow-backs. Within 4 weeks I had more than 1000 followers. A chorus of exclamations erupted from my social media friends: “Crazy, unheard of, amazing.”
Even my husband was impressed with how quickly I was gaining followers. However, he insisted that my success had nothing to do with me. “You’re doing so well because you actually listened to the social media advice and followed it. Not many people do.”
I wanted to think my success was due to my clever tweets or captivating bio – or at the very least, my use of coherent sentences. But a lot of people who wrote gibberish had legions of followers. And Twitter is crawling with people who “sell” followers. It would be unwise to base my self-worth on Twitter stats.
I experimented with hashtags and hated how they disrupted the flow of text. I dropped them.
I began getting responses to my tweets. I soared when I got “favorites” and retweets. Basking in a warm glow of validation, I had to remind myself that I was only collecting names for an agent so I could publish my novel.
But I still thought there had to be more to Twitter than was evident at first glance, some intrinsic meaning beneath the chatter, so I sometimes looked at my followers to see who they were.
It was hard to see real people behind the list of names. When I did I was rarely impressed. Most tweets were boastful, scheming, incoherent, pornographic, trite, or pious.
But when intelligent followers began to communicate with me, I began to appreciate that behind the names were real people. I began to make a few friends.
And an awesome discovery: Twitter was an oasis for introverts, a place where they could congregate and discuss meaningful things, and share their dislike of being social in a judgmental, extroverted world. My mega-talented friends Carrie Rubin and Dyane Harwood have both blogged about being introverted. Reading their posts, I felt wonderfully validated and understood.
It was a revelation. In the real world introverts sometimes avoid each other for the same reasons extroverts avoid them: because introverts wrongly judge each other as cold and unapproachable.
But the friends I have met online were thoughtful, extraordinarily talented, and interesting. I started telling anyone who would listen how awesome my Twitter friends were. I read their blogs and books, and I was happy.
I even started letting others on my Twitter page. When I first went on Twitter, I rarely retweeted. But now I started to retweet what others had written that deserved to be read.
I thought I had found it, the intrinsic value of Twitter: other introverts (i.e. sensible, charming people with interesting things to say).
But I have not forgotten my original goal. In the 8 months since I began tweeting, I now have over 10 thousand followers, which has slightly increased my blog traffic and led to a few sales of my self-published books.
I am about to start sending out my query letters for my novel this week. Maybe the number of Twitter followers, along with almost 40 thousand blog views, will capture the attention of an agent. But I am in no hurry to abandon Twitter.
Twitter is not boring after all. Beneath the rippling surface of mental effluvia are people with dreams, personal histories, memories, and feelings which all converged to a point that led them to Twitter.
That is why, despite all the insanity, digital graffiti, porn, and intellectual snake oil, Twitter is rewarding. Intrinsically rewarding.
And I am glad I gave it a chance.