Description: Fiction Fills Me Up Inside
I joined Twitter in September 2012. Certainly not an early adopter, but about eighteen-months after Twitter proved its usefulness as a worldwide tool of revolution during the Arab Spring of 2011. After I joined, it took me another two and a half years before I tweeted anything. To its credit, Twitter makes it easy; every owner of a shiny new account is provided a scripted first tweet to send, but it’s as cheesy as a wheel of Brie: “This is my first tweet!” Not gonna happen.
In a world tweeting about the toppling of Middle East dictatorships, what does a former English teacher tweet about her struggles to write Young Adult fiction matter? In the end, I spent far too much time over-thinking my first tweet (“Whaaaaat?”). In the end, nobody cares. No one sees your first tweet (or even your first hundred). My angst was wasted energy.
Writers have so many reasons to use Twitter. New writers often use it to connect with others who are in the same boat. They find support, encouragement, and ideas to propel their own writing to the next stage. Finding your tribe can help a fledgling writer through a difficult first draft, or find the guts to submit a piece for publication. Querying writers use it to find and connect with literary agents, to find beta readers for a finished piece, and to learn more about the agents we’re querying (some might