Twitter Saved My Life Tonight

We live in anxious times. I wasn’t even going to post today because there’s some kind of election going on right now. I hope that whoever you vote for wins. Especially, if they’re someone I’d vote for. If not, um, not so much. But this isn’t an election newsletter. This is a newsletter for writers and thoughtful people. Let’s talk about writing.

Thanks to all the new subscribers who have come over from Twitter. The Bird’s loss is our gain. Also, as always, thanks to the premium subscribers who keep this project afloat. It is labor intensive to write anything, as you well know. If you haven’t tried out the Substack app, look up Sitting in Silence there. It’s super easy to use. Now, for a few words about one of my favorite, fading writing tools…

In 2012, I was a struggling writer. Today, like most of us, I’m still a struggling writer, but back then I hadn’t published anything. I had told myself that I was on a five-year plan. If I succeeded in my plan, then I would quit my day job at the law firm and write full time. But by then, if I’m being honest, I was on my second five-year plan or perhaps my third. Suffice it to say, things were not going well. And I couldn’t tell exactly how not-well things were going. If no one is publishing your stories, it’s impossible to tell what you’re doing “wrong.” Most magazines didn’t tell you why they pass on your work. They still don’t today. Not that I blame them. Literary magazines are mostly understaffed passion projects. They don’t have the resources to tell the anxious writer what’s up.

But Twitter did.

I had been on Twitter since like 2008 but didn’t really use the app for much at first. I didn’t understand it and didn’t know how it could help me. Like most users, no one really paid attention to me. If I got two or three stars on a tweet (this was in the old days before the hearts replaced them), I was excited.

I liked to play around on the app…Okay, let me be honest. By then, I was addicted. I’m a gamer child of the 20th century. Pong. Donkey Kong. Mario Bros. (Not “Super” Mario Bros., but the original). I was there at the inception of the now many-billion-dollar industry. If it has pixels, I’ll play it. If I can gamify my life, I will.

And so it was with twitter. I completely fell for the app.  I tweeted a lot. I loved the dopamine hit from every positive interaction. One day in 2014, one of my tweets had 20 stars. It was new version of a tweet that I had posted before. Just a silly little joke that I revised due to a typo. I can’t even remember what it was. Why was the new tweet four times more popular than the one before and all the rest?

Easy answer: Editing.

I had turned a rambling sentence into a succinct one. I cut out all the unnecessary words. My followers responded to that. And all of a sudden, I had a continuous source of feedback for my writing.

I leaned into this discovery. I paid more attention to my sentences. The well-edited ones usually got a better response than the sloppy ones. A snappy sentence is a happy sentence.

And my follower count doubled, then tripled. I went from a few hundred followers to about 34,000 in 2016. (I’m referring to my old Twitter account, which I eventually closed in 2018. That’s another story. I still have my @mauriceruffin) account.

Twitter taught me the importance of paying attention to craft. Readers like good craft. They like poor craft demonstrably less.

This revelation made its way into my writing. My first novel, We Cast a Shadow, which has a lot of punchy, interesting sentences is in some ways a product of my middle-period on the Bird App. If early Twitter was a news feed, and late Twitter was a hellscape driven by the algorithm’s demand for outrage, the middle years was a place for experimentation. So many creators established or expanded “real world” careers using the app as a platform. I’m thinking of Rob Delaney, Mat Johnson, Lady Gaga, and others. I experimented with topics, tones, cadence, etc. I found other writers. They found me. My writing got better.

We Cast a Shadow has been classified as many things: brilliant (New York Times), dystopian (LA Times), horror (Washington Post), a modern classic (my mama; just kidding, she didn’t read it; still kidding, she loved it). Whatever people said about that book, it sold well in part because it melded a serious topic like racism with humor. Possibly the funniest line in the book is one I tested out on Twitter first. It was a tweet of mine that got many thousands of interactions. “I like my coffee so Black the police plant evidence on it.” At least one person told me they spit out their coffee when they read that sentence. An earlier version of the sentence probably had more introductory sentences to set it up. “You know what I like? Let me tell you, I like my coffee with no cream or sugar. I like it extra strong. I like my coffee so strong and black that the corrupt police…” You get the idea.

I don’t want to belabor the point. I just came to say that my career without Twitter would likely have been less bright. A bunch of people I like have left the app. I understand why. It’s not as fun as it once was. I’m still on it, possibility out of a since of nostalgia. After all, things could improve. I’m also not the kind of guy to do what others are doing. But I could leave tomorrow. I took a month off in August. It was lovely.

The real point of this post is to encourage writers to use whatever tools you have at hand to improve your craft. Whether you’re cranking out a book for NaNoWriMo or in the middle of a decade long rewrite, open up your stance. Experiment. Have fun.