Twitter is one of my favorite online resources for writing. It’s a great place to meet writers and find opportunities and inspiration. Everyone uses Twitter differently, but here are five ways I use Twitter to help my writing career.
1. To Connect With Other Writers
Connecting with other writers is one of the best things about Twitter. For me, having an account isn’t about promoting my own work; it’s about connecting with people and sharing experiences. Other writers remind me I’m not alone in my struggles, and they are the best sources of support, whether they’re active in my creative process and let me bounce ideas or critique my work, or are just there to share the misery of discovering I need to rewrite eight chapters of a novel.
While I already have several writer friends who use Twitter, I pick up more writers by doing events like NaNoWriMo or by tweeting about writing and tagging it #amwriting. The #amwriting hashtag is a great way to meet writers or to just offer support to a stranger. A lot of the responses I get to my #amwriting tweets are things like, “Keep at it!” or “Know what you mean,” but even the littlest interactions are opportunities to grow my writing community and make a new friend.
2. To Learn About Craft, Strategies, and the Writing Life
Twitter is my number one place for finding articles and posts that discuss various elements of writing craft and life. Sometimes I’ll hone in on issues that I’m having or stuff that I just like to read about (hello, world building and productivity), but the breadth of topics never leaves me wanting. The trick is curating a good list of people to follow who make sense for me. That means I look for Twitter accounts that link to a variety of writing topics. That includes authors like Elizabeth S Craig and Joanna Penn, and accounts that specifically focus on teaching writers like DIYMFA. Genre twitters like Mythic Scribes and Science Fiction are great for focused articles that hit on genre-specific issues. And it’s easier to find these accounts than I thought it would be since Twitter helpfully suggests similar accounts and often times writers will retweet or talk about a new account to follow. Recommendations make the Twitter world go round.
3. To Find Inspiration
I have found so much inspiration on Twitter, though a lot of that inspiration has come from outside the Writing Twitter World. Back in May I found an article on the Radium Girls of World War I, and a few years ago a friend retweeted a song that severed as the inspiration for the novel I’m currently working on. Accounts related to my genres have provided a lot of inspiration—The Victorian Society and Victorian London have been great for steampunk inspiration and research, as has History In Pictures, an account that posts historical photos perfect for an alternate history author. There really is a lot of inspiration available on Twitter, as long as I’m open to a new idea.
4. To Find Publishing Opportunities and Tips From Insiders
Most literary magazines and publishers have Twitter accounts, and following those accounts are a good way to stay informed about publishing trends and when literary magazines are looking for submissions. I also take advantage of free content to get an idea for what kinds of stories are being published to figure out if I have any stories that might appeal to their editors.
Like following publishers, editors and agents are great sources of information. Recently I’ve been perking up every time an agent tweets a query tip. Many of these tips fall along the lines of “please, stop doing this specific thing,” but recently I saw a tweet from an agent (Kurestin Armada) recommending that if you receive an offer of representation and are notifying other agents who have your query, attach the complete manuscript. I wouldn’t have considered doing that, but hearing the reasoning from the agent gave me the confidence to be so bold!
5. To Find an Agent
I’ve been on the agent hunt this summer, and Twitter has been one of my key tools for discovering and researching agents. Two of the best sources for information and making connections are the #MSWL hashtag and pitch fests.
#MSWL is a hashtag for agents and editors to post their manuscript wish list. While MSWL tweets can appear at any time, there is usually a designated day during the year when the hashtag is most active. During my agent search, it’s been a powerful tool for gaining insight into an agent’s wants and figuring out if I’m right for them, and if they’re right for me.
Pitch fests like #PitMad are an opportunity for writers to let agents know what they have ready to go. During Pitch Madness (#PitMad), authors with completed ready-to-query manuscripts, pitch their book in a tweet. Agents and editors favorite tweets to show their interest. It’s a great way to find agents you might have otherwise skipped querying because—hello, they’ve already told you they’re interested in your story!
I recently participated in a sci-fi/fantasy pitch fest called #SFFpit that garnered likes from three agents—all of whom I queried. Fingers crossed!
When I decided to get an MFA, I knew that writing genre could be a challenge. As an undergrad I was discouraged from writing science fiction, enough so that I took more nonfiction workshops than fiction and didn’t write for a year following graduation. (My realistic contemporary fiction was uninspired, but I wasn’t “supposed” to write science fiction—mentally rectifying that disconnect took some time.) I didn’t want a repeat of that experience, but also in the eleven years between my degrees I had learned a lot about fighting for myself.
After I was accepted to the MFA program—following an application that was basically plastered in warnings that I would be writing science fiction—I still thought I might have a battle. After all, even I, future science fiction writer, had left my undergraduate days brainwashed that science fiction didn’t belong in an MFA program. Even if the faculty accepted me, I could still face challenges from the students.
In my first workshop, I was surprised by the overwhelming support I received. There were a handful of dismissive critiques, but the majority of my classmates treated me like a peer and not like I was an inferior sci-fi writer. One memorable critique recommended that I not be “constrained by the genre” while another student restrained his urge to critique my story using the rigorous standards he would apply to literary fiction (that is a paraphrase, but is fairly close to the actual quote that appeared in his critique). These were the comments I had prepared for and the attitude I thought I’d have to fight. I had thought I would have to demand to be taken seriously, to argue that I was in the MFA program to make myself a better writer—which meant developing the craft of writing as it applied to characterization, description, narrative, world building, and plot. “Literary” is a just word that defines the quality of the writing, not the content, I would argue. It applies to work by Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, and Nnendi Okorafor, just the same as it does to David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz, and Donna Tartt. I was ready for this fight!
But it never came. The handful of dismissive and confused critiques in my first workshop were the main confrontation. My classmates were curious and supportive. At a party, a student pulled me aside and quizzed me for an hour about steampunk and alternate history, just because he’d never heard of it before. Basically, my MFA classmates blew away my expectations and set a tone of acceptance not only for me, but for other students who wanted to try their hand at workshopping science fiction and fantasy.
I knew I wanted to approach the MFA on my own terms, and that I would have to work to get what I needed from it. I am lucky that the professors not only welcomed me into the program, but encouraged me to forge my own path. I still read a lot of realistic contemporary fiction for class assignments, but if I was willing to put in extra work, they were willing to let me write papers exploring point of view from robot narrators and examine the differences in structure between Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. I always say “you get out what you put in,” and that was very much the case for me in the MFA program.
Before the MFA, I was concerned that the divide between literary fiction and genre fiction was too great. I felt like only my echo chamber understood the overlap, but the students and faculty in my program helped me see that we’ve come a long way and that when it comes to accepting science fiction as literature, I am not alone.
Punk sub-genres still seem like something the cool kids are doing, but I feel like a lot of people I talk to don’t understand what makes a genre “punk” as opposed to all the other ways that you can describe a genre—alternate history, science fiction, speculative fiction, urban fantasy, gaslamp fantasy, etc. So why do we keep throwing “punk” on the ends of other descriptors?
Punk movements started primarily in the 1970s as counterculture movements, growing out of the music scene. In the UK, unemployment rates were high, the economy was crap, and the youth were angry and had something to say about it. For the purposes of how punk relates to fiction, many punk genres embrace that same DIY ethic and are anti-establishment with an emphasis on individual freedom; in short, the authors are angry and have something to say about it.
So the punk element of steampunk, for example, is not that an author has thrown in anachronistic technology, thrust petticoats into a steam-powered future, or pasted gears and goggles on a top hat. The punk element is what the author has to say about social and political movements that are counterculture to the time period or to their contemporary society. In the realm of steampunk and Victorian culture it might be a story that is concerned with classism or feminism. In the same time period, but set in New York City, a story might focus on Unions or factory work. In Japan it might have something to say about isolationism or feudalism. Or set in Australia or New Zealand it might focus on the treatment of aborigines and be anti-colonialism. What topic is tackled doesn’t matter so much as the fact that a topic is tackled, and that it is a topic that aligns to problems of that time period and culture.
All punk-genres have this counterculture element in mind, so no matter if the story is alternate history and rewriting the 1940s with diselpunk, exploring the 1500s with clockpunk, or if it’s catapulting into the future and commenting on contemporary society through cyberpunk or biopunk, a punk story will have a social commentary that is counterculture to the society presented in the story.
New punk genres are popping up all the time, so now that you know the crucial element, what sort of new punking do you want to see?
Last week on Twitter a Works in Progress Meme circulated, and I couldn’t resist playing along.
Here’s what I shared according to the likes I received:
- Novel: Gay Airship Pirates, which now includes a feminist book binding sharpshooter and her paraplegic husband who is more awesome than you.
- Short Story: Space Mermaids, which are not mermaids because space, but still lure sailors to their doom… or do they??? Queer protag; snarky girlfriend.
- Short Story: New Orleans house has so much character it possesses a girl and has to come to grips with being mortal.
- Short Story: WWII Coffee Robots—everything changes post V-E Day; is there still a place in the world/economy for robots? Also, robots <3 cats.
- Novel: Time Traveling Archeologists steal artifacts from the past—that’s why some objects become “lost to time.” (inspiration: Daniel Jackson/Robin Hood)
- Novel/Series: THE STEAMPUNK—secret organization seeks to overthrow the monarchy, unwitting machinists & opera singers get involved. Co-authored with @momebie.
- Novel: Space pirate/book collector collab with @sopdet. Adventures! Romance! Books!
- Short Story/Novella: An amateur scientist “tests” a window that allows you to see 2 weeks into the future. One day he doesn’t see himself outside the window.
- Short Story: Arrogant scientist proclaims the end is here! His sentient robots keep up the sham that the world ended to protect his fragile ego.
- Short Story: An old creepy doll abandoned on a park bench gains sentience because people assume it has sentience.
- Novella/Novel?: Pair of spy sisters have telepathy, but only when drinking tea.
- Short Story/Novella?: Scientists create “metallic mermaids” to save ships, but then the mermaids start reconstructing shipwrecks and bringing them to the surface.
What works do you have in progress?
The internet is a vast and wonderful place that provides a lot of information, which means it’s a great place to find ideas for stories or story elements.
Here’s a list of topics that have caught my attention in the last month. (Initial links are provided along with any additional research I may have done.)
The Forgotten Story of the Radium Girls, Whose Deaths Saved Thousands of Workers’ Lives
Warning: the article contains some grainy, yet still gruesome pictures of some of the cancers the women developed.
The abstract on the article sums this up better than I can: “During World War I, hundreds of young women went to work in clock factories, painting watch dials with luminous radium paint. But after the girls—who literally glowed in the dark after their shifts—began to experience gruesome side effects, they began a race-against-time fight for justice that would forever change US labor laws.”
Wonderfully, this is a general summary of a book on the same topic—The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. I know what I’m adding to my Want to Read list.
Aside from the nonfiction account being a fascinating story to tell, there are reminders here about untested new technologies, the hierarchy of labor, and the greed of corporations. (Seriously, can you imagine being told that the “best practice” of your job painting with radium is to lick your paintbrush to a fine point?)
If you don’t want to commit to the book, but are interested in the topic, here are options for further reading:
- Undark and the Radium Girls by Alan Bellows for Damn Interesting
- The Radium Girls via Atomic Heritage Foundation (includes impact on the Manhattan Project)
- Waterbury’s Radium Girls via Connecticut History (information on Radium Girls in CT, including one who survived until 2014!)
Mickey Mouse WWII Gas Masks
A child's gas mask during WWII. pic.twitter.com/HKVrDvE7fg
— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPix) April 22, 2017
Technically this picture was posted at the end of April, but I haven’t been able to get this creepy image out of my head. It also led to me researching what the heck these Disney World War II antiquities actually are.
Designed following the attack on Pearl Harbor, 1,000 of these masks were produced for toddlers in 1942. They weren’t needed in the States, and only a few of these terrifying relics remain.
For further reading:
- Objects of Intrigue: Mickey Mouse Gas Mask by Allison Meier for Atlas Obscura
- Did you know Walt Disney designed the world’s weirdest gas mask? by John Kelly for The Washington Post (contains good historical information on the lack of distribution of gas masks in the US)
- Somehow This WWII Mickey Mouse Gas Mask Was Supposed to be Less Creepy by Leslie Horn for Gizmodo (a lot of the same info as in the first article, but I just really appreciate the title)
Time Travel: A Conversation Between a Scientist and a Literature Professor
An interesting conversation about the “realities” of time travel and how time travel works in narrative fiction (not just in speculative fiction about traveling through time, but the way time is manipulated in narrative forms). It’s a pretty good primer for discussing time travel, and thinking about how to use time travel in different narratives. (They also discuss my preferred time travel theory—parallel timelines—which just makes more sense and is much less headachy than closed time loops (I’m looking at you Harry Potter.))
No further reading links for this one—it’s just a nugget to mull over for another time. Ha, ha.
May has been a pretty exciting month for me. I launched this website, started querying my novel and working on other writing projects, and the Cinescopers podcast returned after a three year hiatus. While some of these experiences are brand new, others are old hat—or they were when I was in practice. Reconnecting with old skills to work on these projects has been something of a challenge.
Podcasting again after three years has been part of that re-learning curve. We’ve recorded three episodes so far and while there are a lot of things I remember, some of those memories are vague, and some things that came naturally to me at the end of our first podcast run now feel foreign.
One of those foreign elements is our intro and outro. I was perfectly comfortable listening to my co-host run through the familiar spiel, but when he asked me to do it for the second episode, I froze. This was a script I knew cold at the end of our 2013 run, and even after Matthew provided a script, I was still struggling with pacing and naturalness and, basically, confidence. Podcasting isn’t part of my regular routine any more and while I’m not quite starting from scratch, I’m not coming from a place that feels like I have three years of experience.
I had a similar feeling when I went to grad school and had to write papers again. It had been eleven years since my undergraduate degree, and while I’d been working in academic publishing, it wasn’t a career in writing papers and following MLA style for citations. I had done this for years as a student! I had been confident writing papers! I had been good at it, judging by my grades! But those first few papers for grad school were like pulling teeth, and I felt awkward (the writing felt awkward) and I had to check and double check and triple check to make sure I was getting the MLA formatting right. The first semester was rough as I relearned the lingo, the thinking, and basically how to approach this very different kind of writing.
Writing short fiction has been a similar struggle. I’ve been focused on long-form fiction for a number of years, so trying to come back to smaller ideas, to constrain the story, to only hint at the larger world, has been a special kind of torture. I’ve read expertly written short fiction to help inspire myself and to analyze how other people do it, and yet when it comes to applying those techniques, I falter. I’ll think I have an angle on how to tackle my idea, and then, 7,000 words later I have people telling me I need another 3,000 words or more. How do you write short fiction? I feel like I’ve completely lost the thread on working that out. (This may be a conversation that is To Be Continued as I try to tackle more short fiction.)
I feel like I’m constantly judging myself against my previously perceived expertise. “I used to know how to do this” is a constant refrain. It’s difficult to know something used to be familiar and then struggle at it now. The set backs have a way of diminishing successes and enhancing flaws.
But here’s the thing I need to remember: It took me the first semester of grad school to get the hang of writing papers, but I did it. I even remembered how to make the process less painful (even if I was still a bit dodgy on citations). I have to assume the same will happen for podcasting and writing short fiction. It may take a few months for me to get comfortable behind a microphone and to relearn the rhythms of our podcast, but it will happen. For short stories? Oh man, if someone can tell me I’ll have it within a year, that would be swell. I suppose the key is patience. I need to be patient with myself while I’m on this re-learning curve and trust that with enough repeated practice, I’ll get the hang of it again.
I previously mentioned that before the MFA program I wasn’t reading very much. There was one year when I read no more than 10 books, and another in which I think I only reread Harry Potter. By contrast, the MFA program at UCF requires a lot of reading. In addition to literature classes and assigned readings, they require a book list of at least fifty books alongside the creative thesis. These books are meant to inform the content of your thesis and the development of your craft. Ideally I would read books by authors I wanted to emulate, or that had content similar to what I was writing, or that could be used for research or further craft development.
“Sure,” I thought, as I read the requirement, “makes sense.” And I got started putting together a book list. I had no idea the way these books would wind up impacting my novel.
I read The Difference Engine and Nights at the Circus and dared myself to write descriptions as vividly as Gibson and Sterling and Carter.
I read The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey and carefully noted passages related to description of automaton restoration to figure out how to provide enough technical information to show a character’s mastery without boring the reader.
I read Victorian novels and wound up getting obsessed with how the structure differs from contemporary literature.
I read Ready Player One and reconnected with modern plot structure, and understood how to write a story with an escalating menace rather than a Big Bad.
I read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and starting thinking more and more about twists and defying expectations, and nearly ripped apart my novel to add a second narrator (it didn’t need it, but I considered it, and in considering it evaluated the choice for a single narrator).
I read Shanna Swendenson’s Rebel Mechanics and found a novel that was sort of like mine (but not at all), but it made me feel like there was a market for the novel I was writing.
I read steampunk short story collections and K. W. Jeter and Neal Stephenson and Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest. All of it—everything I read—I devoured in a new way. I wasn’t reading for pleasure. I wasn’t reading to consume. I was reading to learn and I was reading to apply what I was learning directly to what I was writing. At the end of every book, I sat back and I asked, “What did I learn from reading this? How can I apply that to my manuscript?”
Reading nonfiction for research always made sense to me, but I’d never thought about how reading fiction can also be research. It’s more than just knowing my genre and being familiar with writers I want to sit beside on a bookshelf. It’s experiencing how they put together their stories, characters, worlds, and even sentences. It requires deliberate reading and self-direction, but it is one of the MFA “tricks” I’ll be continuing. I’m not just a writer who reads, I’m a writer who reads to write.
You might be asking, “why did a genre writer who doesn’t want to teach decide to get an MFA?” That is a question I asked myself a few times (especially when I was struggling to find a thesis director), but the truth is that for me, an MFA wasn’t about starting an academic career, and it wasn’t about the degree. It was about framing myself to take the plunge to be a full-time writer.
My decision to pursue an MFA grew out of a desire to change my life. I had moved in with my parents after a divorce and while my job was in publishing, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted to write, but abandoning financial security was terrifying, not to mention that at the time I was fighting through such extensive creative and confidence roadblocks that I was certain to fail if I went it alone.
Which is why an MFA program was perfect for me.
An MFA program would provide the structure I needed to get serious about writing. I would write a novel! I would be a daily writer! I would write 5 or 6 hours a day! I would write 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 words daily! I would be utterly prolific!
Okay, perhaps some of those ambitions were a little naive, but the MFA did provide structure—I am highly motivated by good grades, after all. Academic success was a familiar motivator, wholly removed from the fear of publication and hunting for an agent, so as I wrote, the fear of producing content melted and changed. The more I wrote, the more I felt I could write. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself because in the first semester there was actually very little writing and a LOT of reading.
Reading to Write
While the program I attended at University of Central Florida is workshop focused, there are still a number of literature classes to take and books to read. And from someone who had been working 50-hour work weeks and trying to salvage a failing marriage, it had been a long time since I’d read more than ten books in a year. I was going to have to read ten books a semester. For one class. Eep! The first year was an adjustment, which meant that while I was writing, it was in no way daily or prolific. I wrote the drafts and revisions necessary for class requirements but I didn’t write much beyond that, and I didn’t write regularly.
At the time it was frustrating, but as I accepted my situation I came to understand the benefits of the mountain of reading. It helped me get back in touch with analyzing literature to be able to extract ideas and skills to use in my own writing, and—the big one—it taught me to manage my time and to read regularly again. Reading regularly as a writer is important. You don’t have to read a book a week, or anything else as crazy as the expectations of an MFA program, but reading regularly—within your genre, out of it, and books on craft—is important to developing a writing life.
A Writing Life
After a year and a half in the program, after getting more comfortable with the pressure of writing for my degree and more confident about my ability to write on demand, in January 2016 I started writing every day. It was a “commitment” I usually made and ignored, so when I accidentally discovered that I’d written daily that first week, I challenged myself to write daily for the rest of the month. Imagine my delight when I succeeded! Then I decided to do another month. And another. And then the year.
Over the next year, writing daily, I completed a novel for my master’s thesis. I wasn’t writing 3,000 words a day (I’m still not), and there were plenty of days when I wrote only 300 words a day, but I wrote daily, I had a schedule for completing revisions, I had a full-time writing life, and—most importantly—I had an idea of how to translate what I’d done during the MFA into a routine that didn’t include the safety-net motivation of an academic setting.
Could I have achieved this without the structure of an MFA program? Maybe, but I honestly don’t think so. The program allowed me to build confidence in myself while testing out the waters of being a full-time writer. It provided external motivation that wasn’t as nerve-wracking as other external motivation (needing to pay bills and eat, among them). I could quit my job and dedicate myself to full-time writing because I felt like I was working toward something else (a degree)*. The MFA program was a proving ground, and of all the lessons I learned, the ones about how to organize myself for a writing life were the most valuable.
*I should note that I had funding that covered tuition, health insurance, and a stipend, so my MFA pursuit was relatively risk-free. Not everyone has that luxury, so I don’t think an MFA is for everyone. School is expensive, yo.
Starting a “pro blog” is weird. I kept a personal blog on Livejournal when that was what all the kids were doing, and I moved to Tumblr, even though I never really figured out what to do with Tumblr other than find all of the writing blogs and then reblog pictures and gifs of Captain America and Nightwing. But a blog tied to my public persona as a writer and professional still feels a bit beyond me. What will I say? How will people react? Who will actually care?*
It’s scary to put yourself out there no matter if you’re writing, dating, or opening a potato-peeling business. There’s always the opportunity for failure—or, potentially worse, for silence. So why do it? Why throw myself out there with the possibility that no one is listening and that I’ll still struggle with what to write?
. . . Hmm. You are suspiciously quiet on this topic.
For me, the only real failure is in not trying. Potential is a beautiful thing that can be protected by not acting. I’ll always have the potential to be a writer, even if I never write. I mean, I have the potential to be a trapeze artist or an astrophysicist, even though both seem fairly unlikely at this point. There is a possibility—somewhere—that I could be those things if only I tried. Potential isn’t real; it’s hypothetical and untested. The only way to be anything is to do, to put myself out there and try. So here I am. Doing. How’s it going so far?
* Hopefully prospective clients, publishers, and other people who may actually want to work with me and read my work.