Compatriots and Competitors, Part I

Membership and That Other “C” Word

Good morning and welcome to the second Shelf Life of my week off work. After writing this I have no further responsibilities vis a vis work or Shelf Life until Monday. A terrible responsibility vacuum in which I may prepare my submission for Diabolical Plots or then again maybe I won’t. To say that I would like to be done with this and back to playing video games till the wee hours would be an understatement.

If I’m counting right—although, let’s be honest, I’ve never counted anything correctly in my life—I think I’m coming up on the 200th Shelf Life essay. I’ll try to gather some stats before whenever that actually is so I can have a little Shelf Life celebration in the introductory paragraphs.

Today and next Tuesday I want to talk a bit about online writing communities, and how to find them and become a part of them, and how to suss out whether they’re a good fit for you. This was going to be a one-off but it got out of hand so today I’m going to talk about the writing communities you can find on traditional social media and then, on Tuesday, I’ll follow up with the second half of this article, about other (non–social-media) writing communities.

I’ve talked about finding writing buddies, critique partners, and writing groups before, for instance in Find Your Creative Partners and more recently in Look for the Helpers. Community isn’t important to everyone. Loners exist; some people don’t particularly enjoy the company of peers. But for those who do: Where do you find writing community? Where do you go to look for it, and when you find a community, how do you determine whether it’s a good fit for you?

There’s all kinds of places to find writing community but I can break them down into two categories: Real-life places and virtual spaces. This comes with a caveat that some of the real-life places need to be discovered and joined through online means. For instance, using Meetup.com to locate an in-person critique group that you can join at your local library or coffee shop. Another great in-person source of writing community is taking a writing class or workshop in person, for instance at your local community college. I just checked my local community college and found courses on all kinds of creative writing (eg, autobiographical writing, romance writing, mystery writing, writing for children) as well as writing classes to help with specific needs (like resume writing, business writing, technical writing, and so on). 

There’s nothing like going to school to make friends. I still have great friends in my life from high school and college and both of those were eons ago.

But maybe an in-person writing community isn’t for you for whatever reason—maybe you don’t get out much; maybe you can’t get out for transit or health reasons; maybe you just prefer to live your life in a very online manner (like me). Whatever the reason, if you want writing community but you don’t want to leave the comfort of your home to find it, this article has you covered.

There’s a huge benefit to online writing communities that you can’t easily duplicate with in-person ones and that is the benefit of lurking. For those of you who aren’t very online like me, lurking in this context means belonging to an online community (usually a closed one, like a private Facebook group or a Discord) but not participating in the discourse—literally hanging out in the group reading the content but not contributing to the group. The term lurking has negative connotations but the activity is explicitly or tacitly okay in many online communities. That is, it’s fine to join as a fly on the wall and just observe without participating. While I guess you could do that in some in-person writing communities, it might make others uncomfortable.

Lurking is a great way to screen an online community and see if the vibe is for you before you dip your toe into participating. If lurking is not permitted in a specific community, that should be stated clearly and prominently. My friend Discord, for instance, has a few “no lurking” channels where members who don’t regularly participate in the chat are removed after a while; but most of the Discord is lurker-friendly.

Facebook Groups

First up is everyone’s (least?) favorite social media platform, Facebook. I’ll preface this by saying, we’re not going to go platform by platform and look at the writing communities of every social media hub because they don’t all have robust writing communities. For instance, Instagram (which is image-driven) is not a great social media platform for interacting with other writers. But Facebook and Twitter have fairly active communities so I’ll cover them.

The first thing you need to participate in a Facebook writing community is a Facebook account, a thing I do not have. So for this section I’m afraid I’ll need to give generic (rather than specific) advice, and from memory since I’m not on there anymore. If you are not a Facebook user as a regular thing, you can create an account solely for the purpose of joining Facebook writing groups. Create an account under your author persona and go wild.

Facebook’s “group” functionality lets users with a common purpose join together in a community for discussion, even if those users are not directly connected. Groups can be public to join (meaning you just click “join” and you’re in) or private (meaning you request to join and your membership must be approved), and group content can be publicly viewable or private, viewable only by members. 

There are tons of writing communities to be found among the Facebook Groups out there, from the very general to the very specific. There are groups you can join just to kvetch with your fellow writers and authors, groups to find beta readers and critique partners, groups for writers in different genres, and even groups for finding specific types of writing help. I used to participate in a group called “Ask a Book Editor,” answering publishing questions for writers.

If you have a Facebook account, these groups are available to you to join and start reading and chatting. If you’re not a Facebook user but you’re willing to give it a try, all you need is an account to join a few groups and start browsing.

Writing Twitter

A neat thing about Twitter is you don’t have to be a Twitter user to view tweets. Even if you don’t have an account, you can click through to the #writingtwitter hashtag and read the tweets there and you don’t need to sign up. However, to send any tweets (naturally) or to use the handy features that let you follow conversations and topics, you need an account. Unlike Facebook, which requires your account should represent you in some way, your Twitter account need not. You could make it a Twitter account for your dog or just name yourself a random string of letters and go. No need to create an account that is linked to your personal identity in any way.

The primary way of joining the writing community (the main one or a smaller one) on Twitter is to jump in and start chatting with people. See a tweet? Have a thought about that tweet? Reply to the tweet with your own tweet. Congrats, you’re communing. Other than just Tweeting at people, the two main things to do on Twitter to help you get the most out of your writing community experience (for this purpose, at least) are to join Twitter communities and to follow topics and hashtags related to writing.

Twitter communities, like Facebook groups, are closed but joinable groups of users who have joined together to discuss a certain topic. For instance, “Writing Community” on Twitter has more than 900 members and can be joined with a click. Once you join a community, you can see it on your “Communities” tab. Clicking on the community’s icon takes you to a feed that is only tweets sent by members to the feed. So instead of seeing everything every Twitter user is tweeting, you see only that community’s tweets in the feed. Any user can create a community; membership can be open or restricted; and the content of the community can be viewed by any Twitter user (though only members can contribute to the community).

But not every tweet about writing will be found in a community. Plenty of them are right out there on the main feed with all the ads and memes and political junk and everything else Twitter thinks you should be looking at—so how do you find the stuff you want to see?

Following your fellow writers, publications, publishers, editors, and agents will go a long way toward showing you the content you want to see, since Twitter will populate your feed with the tweets of the people you follow and then the tweets they’ve liked or retweeted. 

You can also filter the Twitter feed by hashtag: In the “Search Twitter” box, type in the hashtag name or topic you’re looking for, for instance, #writing, #amwriting, or #writerslift. Twitter will show you a feed of all the tweets that contain the tag you searched for, and you can view them by top (most popular), latest, and other sorting algorithms. If there’s a hashtag you want to follow all the time, you can use a third-party application to “follow” the hashtag (this isn’t built-in Twitter functionality) or you can save your search. (To save, click the three-dot icon next to your search term and choose “Save Search” from the dropdown.)

Coming up next week: I’ll dish on some of the best persistent, public online writing communities and share how you can find and join some excellent private communities on the Discord app. Till then: Stay cool and stay communal.

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