Finding Seshat in the Summer Dawn

By Sue Repko

Just give me that first line. That’s what I’d said to myself for weeks, hoping for entrée into a new piece of writing. My creative nonfiction group was meeting in 14… 10… 9… 8 days, and I needed to drop something in the Google drive folder ASAP. But even when I did have some free time, I couldn’t focus enough to jot down a single paragraph. For the past month I had voluntarily disrupted my early morning writing routine to re-connect with family and friends 400 miles away from my home in Maine, in what was known in my imagination as the 2021 Sue Repko Covid Reunion Tour.

In the midst of my trip I lost my voice. For the next week I had to carefully plot out periods of silence leading up to meetings with long-lost friends, so that I could make myself heard, sometimes in a rasping whisper. A writer losing her voice, literally and on the page at the same time? The irony was not lost on me as my writing deadline ticked ever closer. It coincided with the day I would drive back north. I usually get a burst of inspiration from a deadline, but I was still processing the 83^rd birthday party my siblings and I had for our mom on the first full day of my tour, not to mention all the other (small) social gatherings since then. Other than the notes in my planner—yes, I still use a hardbound appointment book—I hadn’t written anything new that felt worthy of even the briefest of essays. Just give me that first line, I begged my writer-brain as I barreled along I-95, and I’ll take it from there. By the end of the day, though, the deadline was in my rearview mirror.

That first day back home, I had trouble keeping my butt in the chair. I’d like to blame it on the window installers—the radio station set to the ‘70s, the hammering, the way I had to move from room to room to keep one step ahead of or behind them. But for a person who has a lot of thoughts pinging around in her head at all times, I couldn’t get a single one to hold still long enough for me to type it on my screen.

Well, except for: Just give me that first line.

The next day I awakened with a dim memory of Abigail Thomas and bugs and how she had once handled what some people call “writer’s block,” and I was off to find that essay from this very blog. In “Bugs Are Saving My (Writing) Life,” Thomas wrote, “I’m so stuck. Write about what you notice when you’re stuck, I tell my students. Write about what you notice and see what happens. Nothing happens here except bugs. Oh my god, I think. I’ll write about the bugs!”

Oh my god, I thought. I’ll write about wishing for that first line, the one that will launch my thinking on the page… and let that line open the essay! Take that, writer’s block!

But I’m not sure I even believe in writer’s block. I think of these situations—I have experienced this before—more as resistance. Something in me is resisting written reflection at this particular time. Perhaps all the in-person socializing of the past month had overwhelmed my brain circuitry. As an extrovert, I don’t think “devastated” is too strong a word to describe how the pandemic social isolation weighed on me this past winter. Post-vaccination, I thought I could flip my extrovert switch and interact with ease with many people whom I had not seen in well over a year. I didn’t account for the mental and emotional exhaustion of sharing and listening, all the words, phrases, and sentences bulging with feeling. We had made it. We were still alive. We were here, together. These days, though, gratitude always comes with a caveat: So many are no longer here. So many are still in the midst of a surge somewhere. New variants will be with us for the indefinite future. It’s hard to be too happy for too long.

Just give me that first line. Back home, this was now a full-on prayer, but to whom exactly was I directing my plea? Who is the goddess of writing, anyway, I wondered? Curiosity sent me off to Wikipedia, which led me to Seshat, “the ancient Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and writing. She was seen as a scribe and record keeper. Her name means she who scrivens, i.e. she who is the scribe, and she is credited with inventing writing. She also became identified as the goddess of accounting, architecture, astronomy, building, mathematics, and surveying.” A female writer who was smart enough and talented enough to multi-task across many fields didn’t surprise me in the least—was she the first freelancer?

Another night, another morning, only this time with a name echoing in my mind: Seshat, Seshat, Seshat. And then, in the stillness of the summer dawn, I wrote.

______________________

Sue Repko’s essays have been named notable in The Best American Essays three times and have appeared in Hazlitt, Hippocampus, Southeast Review, The Common, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Literal Latte, and elsewhere. She has finally (!) finished a memoir about her dad, guns, and an unintentional shooting and is looking for an agent. Follow her on Twitter @suerepko or her website www.suerepko.com.

Again. Still.

We woke up and everything had been different for some time now. Maybe we finally slept through the night. Or embraced waking up early, wired without caffeine. Maybe the bleak haze had become familiar, waiting for something to feel like feeling again. Maybe a call came—your friend is dying. Or, I think we should take a break. Or a text, WE WOULD LIKE TO INFORM YOU THAT PUBLIC MOVEMENT RESTRICTION HAS BEEN IMPOSED.

Maybe we woke to the memory of weeks ago, some faraway country tracking their citizens, an alarmist friend stockpiling taco mix, our partner still warm-eyed and cuddly. All we want is to go back to sleep, back in time, to the moment before the pandemic, the break-up, that moment of sweet unknowing, when everything was still OK.

How can we write? How can we read?

How can we possibly address the page with our life, or our characters’ lives, so petty and small in the face of tragedy? How can what we do matter in the midst of the unchangeable?

We search online—everyone else feels this way. The internet is a giant support group. We are still falling. We are all caged with the family we want to love, or alone in a room we used to love. We click angry-sad-angry-sad, wondering why gallows humor isn’t funny anymore. Fear comes in waves—numbers on a graph, an admired person now sick, now dead, the disgust and despair of watching our leaders flail.

We go through the motions. My students need an anchor. My child must be fed. If I meet this deadline I might get paid.

Neighbors whose politics disheartened us now make us rage. We try to forgive, to trust in karma, that something bigger than ourselves is in charge, that there is still a plan…isn’t there?

My best friend dies suddenly, a year ago today, the last day of AWP. The doctor tells me over the phone she is not comfortable, she is in pain. He takes my word that I have power of attorney, that she is a DNR, and I sing poorly through the phone held at her ear, hoping somewhere inside she hears me say goodbye. I fly across the country to clean out her house, reconcile with her estranged sister, hug distant friends in person for the first time. We gather around a garbage can, throw away a thousand photographs, making fun of old hairstyles and appreciating my friend’s artistic eye. We resurrect her hard drive and read her work; re-home her elderly cats. I take home her phone and try to crack it. I write about her. The bottom of the world has still dropped out, but words are a bucket in which I can carry water. Words are an axe with which I can chop wood. Each time I touch a page she edited, I touch my old world, the world in which she is also alive and reading my words. The words are a lifeline from a better past. The words are the seed of a pearl.

We guard our families, while others endanger us. Our ex-lover shows up to get the jacket we hoped he’d forgotten. We wash our hands a hundred times. After a few weeks, the essay or the book or the poem we’ve put aside goes from horrifyingly irrelevant to merely unappetizing. Our calendar clears, disappointment somehow better than hope. We sit down again. Five minutes, can you do five minutes? We tinker. We find the rhythm and lose it. We struggle to say something, anything, on the page. We are not just artists but craftsmen, and craftsmen go to work. We spend our lives sharpening our tools, and they are not just for fine days. Our tools—our words—matter not just for how we use them when all is well, but how we use them to shore up the levee when the waters rise. The people whose stories need sharing, who are not craftsmen enough to write their own, who need to hear our story to know theirs is not singular, still need us. Our words connect them from a better past to a seed of hope, string them a lifeline to the future. Our words say, one day there will be a world again, a world in which stories matter. Our words say, our stories matter still.

When my friend was alive, she told me a parable.

The novice asks the master, “What does one do before enlightenment?”

The master replies, “Chop wood. Carry water.”

The novice asks, “What, then, does one do after enlightenment?”

“Chop wood. Carry water.”

We are awake in a new world, after the thing has come to pass. It is our quiet salvation, to show up to the page and insist our words still matter. To weave a slender thread of understanding and possibility, not only in reaction to tragedy, but in recognition of the stories still to tell and be told. To salve the need for human connection, more dangerous and more precious than we have ever known. Stories are our valuable labor, reminding us that we exist independent of our grief and fear. Reminding us the world matters. Reminding our readers they matter. Saying, I too chop wood. I too carry water.

__

Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Failing Forward: Why Every Draft Counts

By Lisa Ellison

In 2005, I wrote my first book—a horror thriller about a deranged clown who takes a group of modeling-agency students hostage. Over the course of a day, he kills them as they strike poses on the catwalk, certain the most beautiful pictures they’ll take are their last.

It was fun to write, and several friends enjoyed reading it. At the time, I met with a critique group who gathered twice monthly around our leader’s dining room table. Between drinks and snacks, we scribbled notes to each other based on lively discussions about characters that worked and plots that didn’t. Most of our members were working on short pieces for publication or MFA applications. They’ve all gone on to do amazing things and I feel grateful to have worked with them. There was only one problem: the group had never workshopped a book and neither had I.

Feedback on my manuscript was slow and contrary. The most frequent comment I received was a discouraging, “meh.” I muddled through a second draft based on their single-chapter reviews and tried to address their every whim. My energy flagged as I forced myself to find a pleasing narrative arc. A year into revisions I quit. The draft exists on my hard drive, but that’s it. From a commercial perspective, the project is a total failure. Unfinished. Definitely unpolished. Probably not even that good. For a while (okay, maybe a few years), I lamented my inability to finish the book. Sure, other projects had stalled, but this one had taken up years of my life and all it’s done is collect virtual dust.

Thirteen years later, I’m grateful to that failed project. It taught me everything I needed to know about how to write a book. Those devastating “mehs” became the fuel I used to find my voice. Along the way, I realized writing fiction shielded me from the true stories I was afraid to tell—the ones that came more naturally if I gave myself permission to write them.

In 2015, I attempted a second book—this time a memoir about how I believed carrying my belongings across a divided highway at seventeen would save me from the people who had loved and hurt me most. As I sat at my writing desk, I was terrified by what I might discover—or feel—but I never worried about whether I would finish. That 250-page failed killer-clown manuscript proved I could break the first-draft barrier. It also taught me about the second-draft blues, and the importance of choosing critique partners who understand long-form writing and finding beta readers who will read your entire manuscript. Most importantly, I learned I could let a project go and write again.

My second book has gone through eight full revisions. When agents praised my writing but said my narrative arc needed work, I sought editorial advice on the entire manuscript. While I waited, I recorded the lessons I’d learned about how to heal, how to write about trauma, and how to persevere. I also started a new memoir about how traveling with a heavy metal band into post-Bosnian-War Yugoslavia helped me survive my brother’s suicide. I just completed the revised first draft and sent it to editors at a conference.

It might be The One.

Or it could be just another lesson.

What I know for certain is that I couldn’t have written this manuscript without writing my first memoir exactly as I had. Not one word was wasted, even if the narrative arc needs adjustment.

Writing is a process made up of failures. Projects that stall. Unsuccessful drafts. Rejections. Our job is to learn something from each one. As Abby Wambach said in her 2018 commencement speech for Barnard College, “failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on.” Each draft teaches us something about finding our voice, the power of perseverance, and how to peel back the layers of meaning in our work. Our job is to pause, celebrate our efforts, and find those valuable lessons, having faith that each failure brings us closer to success.

In a few weeks, I’ll receive feedback on my latest manuscript, brush a few books and papers off my desk (or maybe not) and begin the long slog of revision. As I do, I’ll enlist a kinder, gentler version of my killer clown (think less Pennywise, more whimsy) to remind myself that the process is all that matters. Failure just signals our projects can ascend to higher levels.

________________________

Lisa Ellison is a writer, editor, and writing coach and member of the Moving Forewords Memoir Collective. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in The New Guard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Guardian, and The Rumpus, among others. She’s currently working on a memoir about how traveling with a heavy metal band into post-Bosnian-War Yugoslavia helped her survive her brother’s suicide. To learn more about Lisa’s work and writing, check out her website or follow her on Twitter @LisaEllisonsPen.

Therapy As Writing

By Kat Read

“I just wrote it down, sent it out, and now I feel so much better. It was totally like therapy.”

I get why people say that. In my personal essays, I write narratives that thread through my life, and sometimes that feels really cathartic and revelatory and all of the wonderful things we associate with therapy.

I still need therapy. I believe that everyone deserves to have the opportunity to unpack their experiences with the guidance of an empathetic professional. Not just because it has made me a happier, more well-adjusted person—it has also made me a better writer.

My therapist H. is a psychiatrist and I’ve been working with him for about a year. His office is in Brookline, MA—if you live in Boston, you’re probably nodding because everyone’s therapist is in Brookline. H. is compassionate and thoughtful and incisive, but none of that really matters for my purposes as a writer. What is special about H. is that he practices Internal Family Systems (IFS), which has been incredibly effective for me, especially as a nonfiction writer.

IFS is a therapeutic technique that posits that inside all of us are distinct parts that serve important purposes. As we move through life, our experiences give birth to different elements of our personality, elements that protect and advocate for our central self, sometimes together and sometimes in conflict with one another.

In my case, there’s a big cast of characters. The queen bee is my intellectual part, who steps in to analyze whenever I become remotely uncomfortable. “I see you’re feeling overwhelmingly sad as you talk about the sudden death of your father,” she likes to say, leaning back in her leather armchair, “Let’s redirect—mention an article about grief you once read in The Atlantic!”

My quietly building part tries to keep me on track with long-term good-for-me goals, but she is often neglected: “You have a shelf of books you haven’t read—why are you watching Gossip Girl again?” Then there’s my people pleasing part. She works overtime at cocktail parties and in job interviews, but she’s at her loudest when my mouse hovers over the “submit” button: “You can’t send that essay out, what if it makes people mad?”

If it sounds a little awkward, that’s because it is. Actually, it’s almost unbearably awkward, at least at first. But it’s worked—over the past year or so, I’ve gotten better at understanding the different components of my personality, developing compassion for myself, and gently shifting all the parts of me to work together with something approaching harmony so that I can live the life that I want to live.

It’s no coincidence that my year in therapy has been very fruitful creatively. Once a week, I talk to an audience who expects me not only to tell a story, but to be really clear on who my narrator is. H. will often gently press me—“Kat, I get the sense that another part just jumped in. Is that accurate?” And I have to take a beat and assess: now, who was that speaking? Was it my intellectual part, swept up in analysis and losing the emotional thread? Was it the part of me so desperate to connect with others, she never says anything controversial? Was it my inner warrior, who wants to defend me, even when I have behaved badly? I have to understand, because H. is sitting right there, in the chair across from me, and he wants to understand.

I have started to bring those kinds of questions with me when I sit down to write. As a nonfiction writer, it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of thinking of my narrator as me, with baggage I know by heart. But someone reading my work doesn’t know all the parts of me. As an essay writer, I have to introduce myself to my reader over and over again, clearly and concisely, in a way that allows me to get to the truth of what I want to say in a given piece. IFS has forced me to think about which parts of me are driven to write an essay so that I can allow those parts to step forward and be in the spotlight. It’s helped in the crafting of essays, too; I know not to let my intellectual part lean too hard on research, and I dial down my inner warrior so my narrator doesn’t come off as defensive.

It’s easiest to speak the truth when I am really clear on who is speaking.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering: this essay was written by my intellectual part, and my people-pleasing part really hopes you liked it.)

_____________________________________

Kat Read owns way too many cookbooks and is a writer in GrubStreet’s Essay Incubator program. Find her online at www.kataread.com.

Thirteen Thoughts On Writing

By Paul Skenazy

1. Writing is an invitation to humility—you realize you’re on the wrong track, you’ve lost connection with a scene, an emotion, a voice. The return on that humility is when your imagination lets you slip into someone else’s skin. The tales you come up with tell the story you are trying to tell when you sit down to write and also the story of the years you spend working on the book. Rendering a/your life into art changes you.
2. Trust your intuitions but trust (admit) that you don’t understand what your intuitions are telling you. They have their own truth and direction; your job is to follow where they lead. This doesn’t mean you don’t exert control, but you don’t exert as much control as you think you do. And you are often at your best when you don’t.
3. Defend your story; don’t give up on it. At the same time, accept that you actually don’t know what the story is that you can tell. It’s likely that what you thought is your story is not your story but a way to discover your story. The poet Richard Hugo talks about what he calls the ‘triggering town’—the place where everything starts, that lets you fly off on the next leap of the heart.
4. Trust your dissatisfactions with what you’re doing. The more you trust them, the more chance you have to make changes.
5. Don’t be afraid of mistakes; they tell you what you are trying that you don’t have control over. They suggest that you are venturing into new territory where you’re not yet sure what you are doing. They’re a sign that you are stretching yourself.
6. Learn about and trust your own rhythms as a writer. That means not only when you write best in the day or week but where, how often, and in what ways. Do you work from outlines? Write the end and then figure out how to get there? Or do you write with no idea where you are going or why? (And if you’re stuck, then your system isn’t working for you anymore; give it up.)
7. Write the first draft so you can get to the second and third and fourth because you can’t get to them except through the awkward and ugly and insufferable and embarrassing and seemingly useless first, second and third.
8. It’s nice to think that art develops organically, from seed to sprout to leaf to narrative. Yes and no. Keep asking yourself, “What work is this moment/scene/word doing?” Answering requires calculation. You manipulate characters, alter lines of dialogue, make up narrative moves. You strategize, reorder, play God. You keep returning to the truth.
9. Tangents can turn out to be the heart of your book. It might take you months or years to figure out what to do with those seeming throwaways—how to put them where they belong, at the center of the story you didn’t know you were after.
10. Make someone else read your work. Forgive them for not loving it or you and for the things they tell you. You asked, remember?
11. Send your manuscript out when you think it is ready and be pretty sure you’re wrong—it most likely is not yet ready. But send it anyway. Then send it again. In between, ask yourself why others don’t think it is ready. Pretend you believe they know better than you. Pretend they are wrong. Pretend there is something to learn or do next.
12. Don’t waste too much time with the Imposter Syndrome and Fraud Police: that inner voice of doubt that says you have no talent, that everyone knows this but is too polite to tell you. The voice that screams that you are and always have been a fake; that your comeuppance is coming. It might be true. But it might not. And no one knows, even you.
13. Maybe my favorite quote about being an artist or human being, and the one I’ve found the most difficult to live by, comes from a Chinese art manual:

Never lose your awkwardness. Awkwardness once lost can never be regained.

If you’ve got anything to add to this world of ours it won’t come from pretending to be someone else. Trip, stumble, admit that you’re an awkward oaf like all the rest of us awkward oafs. Write as you fall, why you fall, how you live with the bruised ego, why it’s worth getting up.

___________________________________

Paul Skenazy won the 2018 Miami University Press Novella Prize for Temper, CA. The book is available from your local bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Miami University Press.

Writing Stage

By Jessica Ribera

I’m a performer to my very core, a person who aced every Show-and-Tell, a woman who never met a mic she didn’t adore. I started life as a ballet dancer reveling in stage time and show people. But context is everything. No one likes to be conspicuous, not even performers. They love standing out–but only in their proper places, the stage or the audition. My current, stay-at-home writer/mom gig hasn’t provided too many theater settings. Now I’m conspicuous: a flamingo in street clothes.

Sometimes I wax on about things no one else thought were weird. “You guys! That Uber ride! We were packed like sardines, but no one was talking! His breath was SO strong, and we kept hydroplaning, then “Don’t stop, get it, get it…” played, and I’m thinking WE’RE LISTENING QUIETLY TOGETHER TO A VULGAR SEX DESCRIPTION, and I. Almost. DIED!!!!”

But I hear, “That’s just Uber.”

I feel crazy. But I promise myself to work the scene into a piece of writing.

In conversations, I often worry I’m moving too much, monologuing about something no one else cares about. I wonder if they’re thinking, She’s interesting… or GEEZ, I thought she’d never shut up. But if someone clicks a link, they’re interested. So onto the paper it goes.

I regularly sit on my hands and wrap my legs to keep from dancing N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” lip-syncing “California Dreamin’” or performing the entire choreography of The Nutcracker in waiting rooms and grocery stores.

I hear a lot of, “You have to come to keep the conversation going.” Or, “show us a dance!” The invitations remind me of the career and colleagues I’ve lost. Rather than enjoying the opportunity to perform, I do it with a touch of sadness. I puzzle over it all by typing.

Once, in my child-filled minivan, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” demanded that I pull over. The thought of backup dancers all working together behind full-force Mariah so thoroughly clouded my eyes with longing, I couldn’t see through my windshield.

Lonely and conspicuous, I pour my performer self onto the page. Writing hasn’t yet solved the need to dance, but I’m finding an audience who love to read about it.

***

Recently in New York, I bought tickets to see a former colleague dance in Aladdin. Jace and I hadn’t seen each other in 20 years, but dance company friends are family, worth vacation cash.

I spent an insane amount on double scotches in adult sippy cups then settled in with friends. When Jace danced on stage, I misted like a mom at graduation.

You’re front and center, baby! On Broadway!

He’s tapping! On Broadway!

He was speaking lines! Popping through trap doors! Taking a curtain call! On Broadway! My pink palms stung with enthusiasm.

We girls smugly pushed past all the kids and parents waiting at the stage door, our names on the list. I admired the bulletin board, covered in call sheets perforated with a million pushpin holes, each one the memory of a callback, letter of dismissal, or renewed contract. There was a familiar lack of opulence, lots of poured concrete, and metal stairways. Pressed to the side, I shyly smiled at the exhausted performers exiting to cheap dinner, stiff drinks, and long subway rides. I wanted to shout, “I’m in your club!” and follow them out.

Jace came around the corner and I wrapped my arms around his sweaty muscles. “I am so proud of you.” He laughed in my ear and hugged me. “Want the tour?”

The New Amsterdam is the second-oldest theater in Manhattan. Huge photos of Ziegfeld Follies girls line the walls backstage. Jace was a great tour guide, like someone trained at Disneyland. But I honestly didn’t care for factoids. I wanted to gaze toward the house seats and beam into the balconies. My back straightened and clavicle spread. I pressed into my hyper-extended knees, and my feet turned out involuntarily. My little nostrils sucked backstage smell into my brain. It was as though someone held out white-dusted hands saying, “Remember cocaine?” And I could only answer quickly, inhaling deeply, “OH. MY. GOSH. YES.”

Costumes had Sharpie names in them same as ever. Lit mirrors showed no technological improvement. I could see the trap doors and tricks. Every mark on the stage directed me: “strike a pose!” While Jace answered questions in the wings, I stole back to center stage and sank into a perfect 180-degree split in my mom jeans and cheetah sweater.

Memories swished through me, but one thought rose to the surface:

This just can’t be over.

***

Barely into my career, a stagehand’s mistake sent me crashing to the floor and ruined my back. Devastated and no longer fit for classical ballet, I was dismissed from my places to be safely conspicuous. I retreated to practical pursuits: college, marriage, clean house, pregnancies.

I’m wildly thankful for my family.

I miss that old self terribly.

Dancing on the page helps me find and reincorporate her. Like Roald Dahl’s BFG, I package sensations to blow into people’s ears. Maybe the effort will reveal a path back to theater, my true home. For now I write to build my own stages and studios. I shout from the page, “Come in! See my thoughts. Add your feelings. Let’s be conspicuous!”

_________________________________________
Jessica Ribera moved to Seattle at 17 to dance with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Now, she lives there with her husband and four wild children. Her work has appeared in The Mighty, Scary Mommy, the Brevity blog, Fathom Magazine, and Red Tricycle. The Almost Dancer, her memoir of dance and disaster will be published by White Blackbird Books in 2019. Find her as @jeskybera on Twitter and @thealmostdancer on Instagram.

Building Your Twitter Following

Does Twitter help sell books? Nobody knows. Barnes & Noble customers rarely announce “I came in because of this tweet!” But being visible in the online writing community can be a source of support and inspiration, and enough agents and publishers look at follower numbers to make it worth growing your presence on Twitter.

Twitter basics are just like showing up at an enormous pool party already in progress: Watch conversations before interacting, interact kindly and pleasantly and avoid “fighting words” unless you’re doing it on purpose. Just like that party, you get to swim when you like and stay dry when you want: Twitter rewards occasional involvement throughout the day or week rather than constant checking.

We talked last week about “what the heck to post on Twitter.” But the early days often feel like speaking timidly into the void (647 following! 12 followers! Augh!). How can you organically grow an online community who share your interests and want to hear what you have to say?

The best way to get followers is to follow people, but not randomly. Who will you enjoy reading and who will follow you back?

• Use Twitter follow-frenzies. Search your Facebook writing group for a post asking members to comment with their Twitter handles. Follow them all, and post yours as a clickable link. If you can’t find a follow-thread within the last six months, post one: “Hey, let’s follow each other on Twitter” plus your link will do just fine. It is polite to follow back everyone who follows you unless you actively dislike their bio/feed.
• Go to users’ actual profiles. Hit “follow” and wait for a moment—Twitter will suggest more people you might like. Follow them, too.
• Visit your favorite literary magazine or author’s profile. Add their followers. Use the “followers” list, because the “following” list is likely more famous and less motivated to follow back.
• Follow other writers with low follower counts. Someone with 367 followers is more likely to follow back than someone who already has 70K.
• Follow people who liked a tweet you also liked, or whose response you liked.
• Search hashtags like #amwriting #writingcommunity #writerscommunity #amediting and #cnf (those are clickable links to those searches). Follow people who use those hashtags in tweets and/or their bios.
• Use Lists. To keep track of the people you want to read in that blur of new tweets, assign people you follow to lists. For example, I made a list of “Agents” so I can read only tweets from literary agents I follow. You can also look at someone else’s list: Click on a profile, click Lists, and click on a list. For example, here’s all the AWP presenters for this year’s conference. If you’re attending—or want the conference buzz—subscribe to see those tweets. Then click List Members and follow everyone who seems interesting.
• Unfollow people who don’t follow back after a few weeks unless you are specifically interested in what they have to say. (Michelle Obama is probably not going to follow me back.) Most of my non-mutual followers are news, politics, public figures, literary agents and publishing houses. You can use a tool like Tweepi (start with the free plan to see if it’s for you) to sort your list and easily unfollow non-followers, or just scroll down your Following list on Twitter—it’s in chronological order.
• Don’t bother to follow back travel bloggers and business coaches with huge follower and low following numbers unless you’re really interested. They are using bots that will unfollow you after you follow them (this also happens on Instagram). Dudes with two first names (like ‘Robert Walter,’ ‘James Joseph’), very all-American profiles, and jobs that are military or military-connected in Africa or the Middle East are bots or scammers.

“But Allison,” you ask, “How can I engage meaningfully with the thousands of followers I’d like to have?”

You don’t have to. You’re not on Twitter to talk to anyone, you’re on Twitter to talk to everyone. It’s not like letting your best friend sit next to you at lunch—be part of a great conversation this minute, then move on. Support the people you know well or in person. Retweet writers and cool things to read. Post things you find funny, interesting or cool. Step back and engage meaningfully with the community as a whole, rather than focusing on individuals. Let Twitter wash over you like a wave—and get out of the pool when you need a break.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Will You Social Media Today?

Yes, yes, we know. Build a platform big enough and the agents will beat a path to our door. What we really want to do—what we should actually do more than anything else—is write. Yet as memoirists, agents and publishers want to know: How many people can you reach with the news your book is out? How many of them are in the demographic likely to buy your book? How many will leave a glowing review, either because your book is great or because they love you and you write about what’s important to them?

Platform-building is a long haul, and it’s hard to know how to spend our time and focus day to day. What the heck are we supposed to put on social media anyway?

Try:

• A new book you think is great.
• Something you overheard that makes interesting dialogue.
• An article you wrote or were involved in publishing: link the article and quote a couple of sentences that seem mildly inflammatory or counter-intuitive.

NEW: “To them, I must look like the girls climbing poles in the background of The Sopranos and in so many rap videos. It’s safe to say they wouldn’t have guessed I’m a professor at UCLA with a background in social work.” https://t.co/JPtHhwZrLO

— Narratively (@Narratively) February 4, 2019

• An article you liked about writing: link plus a quote and/or your opinion or contribution to the advice.

Just when you thought you couldn’t love @ReemaZaman more…she’s featured in @MsMagazine !! THIS! https://t.co/vkTGQc84Eh

— Elane Johnson (@ElaneJohnson) February 5, 2019

• A writing meme
• Encouragement to someone else
• A fun poll

Important Super Bowl Poll:
What was more boring?

— Mike Redding (@ReddingWriting) February 4, 2019

• A serious poll

Sunday #TWIG poll –

Which of the following would be your “I’m finally a successful author” moment?#amwriting #writingcommunity #writingcommmunity

— TWIG (Traveling Writers International Guild) (@TWIGwriters) January 27, 2019

• A retweet of someone else’s opinion with a comment agreeing or disagreeing or adding to the conversation.
• A cartoon or quote that inspires you.

Most of us won’t ever get big enough that platform alone gets us published, but plenty of us have stories compelling enough that a nudge from platform might tip us over the edge from unpublished to published. Take a few moments, and build a little of yours today.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

The Time Aspiring Writers Spend on Writing-Related Activities

By Jared Bilski

• Tweeting funny comments, often involving coffee, along with the #amwriting hashtag – 8%
• Posting photos on your Instagram of a coffee cup and a leather-bound journal; a coffee cup and a laptop; or a coffee cup, a leather-bound journal and a laptop along with the #amwriting hashtag – 6%
• Obsessively checking your #amwriting tweets and Instagram posts for engagement and responding when necessary – 11%
• Posting long, meticulously proofed posts to a variety of Facebook writing groups, posts which are ostensibly about a ridiculous technical concern you have about your incomplete (novel/memoir/screenplay) but are really ways to remind others you are, in fact, a writer even if you feel like you are a fraud with a dogshit idea for a (novel/memoir/screenplay) – 17%
• Pensively smoking hand-rolled cigarettes – 7%
• Crying – 11%
• Crying while reading David Foster Wallace while pensively smoking hand-rolled cigarettes – 9%
• Letting people know you’re a writer during completely unrelated conversations – 10%
• Research (i.e., stalking the social media accounts of famous authors for whom you harbor great resentment and jealousy toward because if you had even a third of their connections and trust money you would be the one talking to Terry Gross about your latest novel instead of writing these goddamn #amwriting posts) – 3%
• Finding creative ways to convince your parents big things are happening with your writing while also casually asking them for money – 16%
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  Jared Bilski is a writer and comedian who lives on a creek in Collegeville, Pa. He’s written for The Washington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Fatherly and a bunch of websites that no longer exist. The brand/third-degree burn on his left shoulder is a permanent reminder of the stupidity of his youth. Find him on Twitter at @JaredBilski.

 

I’ll Be A Real Writer When

By Janine Canty

I could give a five hour talk on how I’m not a Real Writer.

When I was 18 and headed to college for journalism I believed the Real Writers all lived in New York and had their shit together. They smoked long cigarettes, and had voices like gravel mixed with honey.

I did not make it to college. Because I didn’t have my shit together. I got knocked up to a Meatloaf song instead.

I almost forgot the writing dream in the ensuing years.

Newborn babies that kept coming. Two AM feedings. Colic. Stretch marks. Mastitis and ice in my bra.

Then I took the writing dream and I hid it deep. Because the boy I married was made out of mean. He wanted to own every part of me. And the things he couldn’t own, he destroyed. So I buried my writing dream.

Then I got divorced and I dug that sucker up.

And I wrote. Blog posts at first mostly. I wrote and I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

At first I thought: Well, I’ll be a Real Writer when more than 3 people read my blog. Or when someone outside of my family says: Hey, Janine, your writing doesn’t suck.

I got 30 followers. I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

I got 40 followers. People outside of my family began saying: Hey, Janine, your writing doesn’t suck.

I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

50 followers.

60 followers.

Still didn’t feel it.

Then I began playing the “I’ll Be A Real Writer When” game.

I’ll be a Real Writer when I have an MFA.

When I have my picture on a dust jacket.

When I have my shit together.

When I learn to type.

When I get paid.

When I understand my writing process.

When I have an actual writing process.

On and on.

When I am actually published. Not self published.

Then I was actually published.

I screamed. I stepped on a cat. I had a toilet brush in my hand.

I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

Nada.

Maybe that one essay was a fluke?

So I wrote a second essay. It, too, was published. It won the Freshly Pressed award from WordPress.

It went viral.

And I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

I was invited to go to Vermont to a writing retreat. With actual Real Writers.

My inner voice screamed: Janine, what the actual fuck are you doing??

I went to Vermont and I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

I kept submitting to different online sites while I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

I’ll be a Real Writer when I have an essay published in print. When I can hold my words literally in my hands.

When I can touch my name on a paper byline, I’ll be a Real Writer.

I got published in print.

I held my essay literally in my hands.

I touched my name on a paper byline.

And I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

I sat in an Italian restaurant across from a Real Writer. She was every bit as luminous as her words. She took my breath away.

She looked at me and she said: Janine, your writing doesn’t suck. Or maybe she just said: Janine, pass the parmesan cheese. I was awestruck and leaving my body.

I sucked harder on my Long Island Iced Tea.

And I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

How about this?

I wrote constantly during that summer.

I felt nothing like a Real Writer.

Because surely a Real Writer would know what works and what doesn’t?

That essay got published on a site I’d coveted. Dreamed of. It was the brass ring of online publications.

I pinched myself to make that feel real.

And I waited to feel like a Real Writer.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

The real writers don’t necessarily have their shit together.

Some will have an MFA.

Some won’t.

They will all have different voices.

They will all have a different writing process.

Or maybe they won’t have a writing process at all.

I think the thing that makes a writer real. Is the words.

The words they are willing to lose sleep and maybe a little bit of sanity for.

The words they will do anything for.

It’s not about the money for the real writers.

It’s about the words.

It’s always about the words.

And not giving up on the words.

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Janine Canty is a human trying to pose as a writer. She doesn’t believe she makes words happen. Words make her happen. Her online work has appeared on The Manifest-Station, Literary Orphans, The Rumpus, The Weeklings, and Sweatpants & Coffee. She has an in-print essay featured in the literary journal The Dandelion Review. She lives in Northern Maine and can be found on Facebook.