2017: The Year I Became a Full-Fledged Twit
(Why I think Twitter is a useful tool for writers.)
I’ve had a Twitter account since 2007, but rarely used it until recently. It wasn’t that I didn’t “get” Twitter. I got the idea, but didn’t see the point. I had Facebook as a way to communicate with friends and family, and on Facebook I could use as many characters as I damn well wanted to say something.
Up until this year, the most fun I had on Twitter came during the Twilight Zone marathons that run on the Syfy Channel every July 4th and New Year’s Eve. A bunch of us hang out on #TwilightZone hashtags and do an MST3K job on the episodes. It’s lots of fun.
In March I entered Pitch Madness, a contest where I submitted information about a novel I was ready to query in the hopes of getting some agent requests. The winning teams moving to the next round were announced on Twitter. On the day the teams were named, I spent more time on Twitter than I had in the entire time I’d had an account up until then.
And by the end of that night (during which I found out that I’d been added to a surprise seventh team), I realized that as a writer, I’d been doing myself a big disservice by ignoring Twitter. There is an enormous community of writers over there. Not just the big names like J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, either. There are writers at every stage of their careers using it regularly, and so there are a lot of events geared towards us.
I just completed a month long project titled #WIPjoy. Every day in April, participants answered a question about their works in progress. Questions could be about the story setting, the premise, a character’s worst memory, or a few questions about the writers themselves. This was fun, and because I was editing my WIP for Camp NaNoWriMo at the time, it helped me learn new things about my story and my characters. I decided that this song, which I’d never have bothered looking up if there hadn’t been a question about my MC’s favorite music, was her favorite song. My novel is set in 1913, you see. Those fellows with automobiles might have seemed like bad news indeed back then.
More established writers hang out on Twitter and offer advice and encouragement. I sometimes feel like I’m a silly old person who waited too long to break into writing for publication, so it helped a lot to hear from writers like Chuck Wendig and Ann Leckie that they didn’t make their first sales until their late 30s and early 40s.
There are also frequent Twitter pitch parties. You condense the plot line of a novel you’re querying into a 140-character pitch (which ain’t easy, granted) and Tweet it, and if an agent likes that Tweet, you can send them your query and whatever other information they specify. You shouldn’t focus on this as a replacement for the slush pile, and you must do your research about the disreputable agents who might pop up. But being able to sum up your novel in a brief sentence is a handy skill to learn, and I’ve had requests for pages through these parties. The next #PitMad is in early June, if you have a novel ready to query.
Oh, and did I mention agents? Because plenty of them hang out on Twitter too. And the ones I follow are nice people who want to help writers rather than sadistic gatekeepers who want to keep the little guys out of publishing.
They give a heads up if they’re closing to queries, or if they’re re-opening. They might mention a genre they’re really, really anxious to see right now — or something they’ve already seen enough of. Some of them offer blocks of time for you to discuss a query or your first page with them. One of them pledged to give a personal response to every query he received that week, and I hope he can eventually dig himself out of the avalanche of queries (including mine) he got. They really do want to share what they know and to help, and that’s something I might not have ever been aware of if I hadn’t started following several of them.
Now it isn’t all the Algonquin Round Table over there, of course. There’s drama. There are people who don’t want to interact with you as much as they want to nag you about buying their books, and while that’s fine, it’s not why I’m there. (And before this month is over, I’m probably going to rant a little about that, but not now.)
But if you’re looking to publish a novel or just to meet other writers and get support and encouragement, Twitter is another resource you should add to your toolbox. I’m @insomnicole over there, if you’d like to say hi.
This is part of the Ninja Writers May Post-A-Day Challenge. If you enjoyed this, I’d ❤ a recommend heart. You can find a listing of my fiction on Medium here, and I blog occasionally over at my personal website.
