Writers on the Internet: The Age of Twitter

At sixteen, my best friend sobbed when I told him that my family was moving out of state. I hadn’t expected such a response, and as I listened to his end of the phone call, I interjected, I’ll be there in ten minutes. It was the only time I left my mother’s house without asking, just ran through the kitchen and said, He’s crying. I’ll be back later. Uncharacteristically, my mother didn’t tell me when to be home that night—or on my last night in town, which I also spent at my best friend’s house. It was largely uneventful, unfolding in the way I now understand teenage boys often approach emotion: we watched baseball. He told me about the technology behind his new favorite video game, showed me how realistic the pajama-clad girls looked in the scenes when the attackers surprised them.

Our fumbling, doomed skirmishes at romance still lay ahead of us, but even on that August night, I knew there was something significant about him, something that transcended my friendship with my best female friend, who I gave (I think) a book to remember me by.  My goodbye gift for him was much more heartfelt: a posterboard-sized collage I’d spent hours crafting, snipping out key photos and phrases from YM and Seventeen. I’m pretty certain the phrase Friends Forever appeared somewhere, probably tucked between some cartoon hearts, some carefully-chosen words meant to suggest love without actually naming it. It must have referenced inside jokes, though now I’ve forgotten them all.

It’s stretching, of course, to call it a gift—if anything, it was for me more than him, a chance for me to insert myself into his consciousness, to make sure I remained unforgotten. Even though I was the one leaving, I wanted some part of him to trail after me—not physically, of course, but emotionally. I wanted his heart to follow the moving van all the way down I-75, far into the Deep South state I would come to call home.

I thought of this last month, two decades later, as the semester ended and the college students I teach were busy crafting their own goodbyes. Some of them negotiated their anxieties in the creative writing they composed for our workshop; others tucked notes into their finals or portfolios, sharing personal email addresses and urging me to stay in touch; one proclaimed, I’ll see you on twitter! (I should add, too, that a small handful of students walked out of the last meeting and into the lives awaiting them, uninterested in anything beyond the confines of the classroom—and that’s perfectly okay.) I’m not sure what the ones who’ve found me on social media have expected to see, exactly, and I don’t know that I’ll ever ask them, but I imagine they might be surprised by what’s met them there in this virtual space bearing my name.

What they do find is my version of the twenty-first century commonplace book, a collection of excerpts from my reading, thoughts on the writing life, or the ideal life, a version of the “best self” I strive toward but don’t always achieve. That best self is often in dialogue with the actual self, as in a pair of tweets I crafted while procrastinating in drafting this essay.

First I tweeted as the actual, struggling self:

writing under a deadline=I want to eat fried foods,

drink bourbon, go running, write letters to LChoplin,

memorize scientific names of frogs

Then I followed immediately by referencing the self I hope to be (and stealing language from Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts”):

instead I’m going to sit here til I have a shitty first draft,

then a less shitty next draft, & so on & so on until I finish

or it’s morning

A lot of authors speak of using social media as a mechanism for self-promotion, a space to publicize their works and build a following. And those are fine goals—I certainly share publication news of my own, and I’m as quick as the next person to use twitter for rapid-fire conversational exchange, to crowd-source advice on books or clothes or cooking. And at my core, I’m still that sixteen-year-old who tosses words out there and hopes someone engages with them emotionally. Yet the real value of twitter, for me, isn’t in any traditional sense of promotion—not any version a marketing professional would applaud or approve. Rather, it’s in the more ecumenical sense of promotion—that of self-improvement and betterment rather than fame or commercial gain.

Historically, the commonplace book dates back centuries, to at least 2500 years ago. Of course, back then it wasn’t an actual book, but the practice was the same—collecting ideas and words, things to inspire and improve you. In more contemporary times, philosophers and schoolchildren used the commonplace book as a storage place for all the items they gleaned from books or sage teachers. And even more recently, Marianne Moore used the unattributed words of many diverse and divergent voices as scaffolding for her poems. Though the technology differs, the impulse doesn’t: to collect the things that have attracted your attention, to present them to the people around you, and to hope an exchange follows. That’s not just the core of my Twitter persona; for me, it’s what it means to be human.