There’s a scene I really love in The Princess Bride, right after Welsey tells Buttercup (“as you wish!!”) that he’s actually her long-lost love, where they escape into the Fire Swamp to get away from Prince Humperdink. Which, okay, escape one danger but confront a new host of them: ROUSes, quicksand, and jets of fire everywhere. The scene totally holds up. X many years on, and despite the corny ROUS costumes, my kids still jumped while watching when Wesley got bit.
I have no idea why I was thinking about this scene this morning when we got news about the likely sale of Twitter. Except that on further reflection, I knew exactly why I was thinking of that scene, because social media is the Fire Swamp most of the time. There’s flame wars and trolls in egg-avatar masks and the quicksand of fake news. Will the sale of Twitter make those things worse? Oh, very likely.
But also, there’s a need to be there, on Twitter, if you want to move a (specifically, your) story forward. “You don’t need to be on Twitter to write,” you hear. I know! I know that’s true, but I also most frequently hear that from people who have in-person literary support networks or an established name. Many people are threatening to leave the platform, but ughhh. Sad, but as someone who lives rural, who has young children, who has released a debut novel, I don’t know how to? I cannot articulate how important Twitter has been to finding my space in all aspects of my writing life: as a humor writer, an essayist, a novelist. I find opportunities to submit, stories and articles that I never would have stumbled upon otherwise, and actual friends who make it manageable to brave the swamp. I found my fellow podcast-hosts on Twitter. When my tweets go viral, I see a sales bump.
I wish this were a joke! It is not. Even tweets entirely unrelated to my books (or books at all!), when I post a link to my book, I see a jump in sales.
I wish there were great alternatives, but TikTok takes too much time. Instagram makes me feel like a product. Facebook is blah. Litsy is great, but tiny and insular.
Help.
I wish I could exist as a creature of pure aestethetic seperation. I wish I had the fortitude to save my jokes for a different purpose than quick hits of dopamine.
I like the Fire Swamp as an analogy for Twitter because no one thinks about actually fixing the Fire Swamp— or it seems insurmountable to do so. The point of the Fire Swamp is that it’s always bad and going to stay that way. I don’t have a smart way to end this other except that if I had billions of dollars, I wouldn’t be on social media at all. I would be too busy buying paying the actors from the original movie Matilda to remake the movie Matilda, twenty-five years on. And probably doing more stuff for the environment.
Anyway, wave if you’re on Twitter. I’m there, too, slowly sinking into the discourse-sand.
What I’ve Been Reading
Disorientation by Elaine Hsien Chou, Savvy Sheldon Feels Good as Hell by Taj McCoy, Number One Fan by Meg Elison, and I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
What I’ve Been Watching
Our Flag Means Death (Renew it, you cowards!), The Flight Attendant, Barry
What I’ve Been Writing
Unresolved Questions I Have for Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)
Who Gets to be Ingenues: Big Girls or Little Girls? (Catapult)
New Season of Blind Date with a Book has started! Get your book recommendations from us and find us on the Fire Swamp