Read on Twitter
The short version: I'm leaving Twitter for a while. I'll be back at the end of February.
The long version:
The long version:
Actually, you know what? Let's skip the long version. I've written several drafts of it, and none of them work. I've never been great at non-fiction. Trying to capture all these different and contradictory angles—the way I'm very grateful for how the Twitter reading and writing
communities have supported my books in general and Hideout in particular, and how I feel guilty for taking all that support and then vanishing without giving anything back, but how I just can't stay because I feel like my brain is melting. It's not just my feed and the endless
stream of things that the algorithm has correctly predicted will make me angry, which will keep me online, which will help to sell junk to me. It's not just the "trending topics" which I feel compelled to click on even though I know they're like stacked potato chips—painfully
salty, quickly forgotten and bad for you over the long term. (As I write this, the topic "How a photo of my foot became anti-vaxxer propaganda" vanished, to be replaced by hashtag "CrybabyTrump".) It's not just the issues around privacy, bubbles, fake news and so on. It's not
even the two to three hours per day I'm here, which could surely be better spent. (I keep picturing myself on my deathbed, my voice a harsh rattle, saying, "I wish I'd Tweeted more!" The image is ridiculous, compared to "I wish I'd read more books!" or "I wish I'd known my
children better," both of which feel alarmingly authentic.) No, the main thing is that spending all this time online is changing the way I experience the world. I used to go through life looking for stories to tell. Now I've found myself looking around for things to post about.
I worry that if I keep going down this path, my books will cease to be imaginative or original. I can't even enjoy reading anymore, because whenever I hit a good paragraph, I feel the urge to take a picture of it. I almost always resist that urge, but it's too late—the thought
alone has taken me out of the story. (Wow. Looks like you're getting the long version after all, huh? Albeit unedited.) And I get that this seems like a pathetic thing to complain about, when half the world is on fire, half is grappling with a deadly pandemic and half will soon
be underwater. (Yes, I know that's three halves, but there's quite a lot of overlap.) And I get that no-one really cares whether I'm on Twitter or not, so it probably seems like pure ego to have this lengthy explanation. The worst part is that as soon as I post this, log out and
get my wife to change the password, I know I'll immediately feel the desire to log back in and check how people are responding to this thread. Are people "liking" it? Retweeting it? Replying? What if it's... *hushed voice* ...going viral? And all these thoughts will distract me
from the books I'm supposed to be writing, and the world that it supposed to be inspiring them. The bottom line is this—I think the same curiosity and propensity for distraction that allows social media to hijack my brain is also what makes me a good writer. I'm not saying that
there aren't great writers who have healthy social media habits. I'm just saying that it's futile for me to try to bully myself into being a more focused person, because that guy wouldn't have had the thoughts and ideas that made my books what they were. (It's probably a bad
sign that I used past tense just there.) Leaving is the only way. You may be wondering at this point, why come back at all? Well, it's because The Missing Passenger comes out in North America in February, and I owe it to my publisher to promote it. And then there will be
Stunt Kid Seriously Stacks It, and then 200 Minutes of Mystery, and so on, and so on. Publishers like their authors to be online and willing to engage with readers, so I can't leave this place entirely. (As some reviewers have pointed out, Hideout has a strong anti-social media
message, and thanks to COVID, I've been forced to promote it almost entirely on social media. The irony hasn't escaped me.) But I'm hoping that a digital detox will cure my brain of some of its worst tendencies.
So this is me, signing off. So long, and thanks for all the chips.
