A piece of advice floating around the writer community from established authors is to carve out a portion of the internet for yourself. I.e., a website or blog (yes, a blog is technically a website) somewhere you have complete control. Do this so that in the very real and present future, if someone takes control, changes, deletes, or otherwise craters other platforms (*cough, Twitter, cough*), you can fall back on your website. No one can take it from you unless our celestial overlords destroy the internet (not as horrible a future as I’d once thought possible).
In the early aughts of starting a “writing career,” whatever that means, I somehow stumbled onto #writingcommunity on Twitter. A sprawling group of writers throwing everything into the Twitter void. Should we use adverbs? What is your MC having for breakfast? #pitmad. #amwriting. All the glorious memes about notebooks. Follow Trains. Anyway, sifting through the mess of people in this community (hey, I’m one of them), I was able to carve out a small group of people. They were the only ones who answered my questions—the ones who liked my tweets. A couple formed a writer’s book club with me, and we met for almost a year, reading books about writing and discussing it from our own experiences. Halcyon days, indeed.
However, besides these sparse friends, I never gained any traction on Twitter. At best, the algorithm pretends my tweets have some basic merit and then mostly ignores them. But it was comforting to know a whole host of people sat a keystroke away at #writingcommunity. And I genuinely adore the close friends I’ve made over the years.
But now, with the acquisition of Twitter by the bro mad scientist (yes, you can see my feelings on this individual from this), I don’t expect to be as interactive on the site. The thought of creating value for him and his cronies puts me off. And while I will miss interacting with my close friends there (hopefully, we will connect on other sites), I can’t see a near future in which I want to engage on that site. So I’ll become another of those profiles who pushes, sadly, blog posts like this, and hopefully books too.
I’ve already removed the app from my phone, making my days more enjoyable. Most of the time I spent recently wasn’t interacting with fellow writers. It was getting sucked into the wrong side of Twitter. The part where you might get mugged if you’re not careful. And that’s ultimately what the site wants for you. Rage fuels their profits. It’s just not where I want to spend my time. I’d rather write blogs or novels, or short stories. Or read books, or play games, then sit perpetually doom-scrolling. And at the end of the doom-scroll path is simply more things to doom-scroll over.
Thus, instead of shouting into the Twitter void, I’ll be shouting into the internet void.
Oh, and you can always find me on Threads: @chaney_writes
Joy.
Update: A couple of months after this post, I completely deleted my Twitter account. I will not be active there again in the future. There is a thriving community of writers on Threads, and Bluesky looks like it’s coming along as well. There are still vibrant communities of writers online; we each have to choose how we want to find them and who we choose to give our time to.
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