an elegy to the death of community
writing twitter, covid trends, and community in THE DARK WE KNOW
I'm hyper conscious of what feels, both in the people around me and the general collapse of twitter and writing twitter with it, like a sense of a lost chance. It's changed, in the past 9-10 months especially. Everyone used to be on there; it was called the industry watercooler for a reason, and there was a sense of energising openness and excitement among the aspiring writer communities.
Even before the takeover, it felt like people were getting more careful about what they were sharing. We started seeing the decline of pitch parties and mentorships, formerly things that felt like they structured, rallied and motivated me entering publishing. Artificial goalposts, yes, and not without downsides, but they were smaller steps to work toward besides agents and book deals. A lot of us tried to write toward certain pitch events or mentorship deadlines. It was exciting to work on similar timelines. And yeah, things come and go all the time, but nothing's taken their place yet. The mentorship programmes are a big loss especially. Beyond the social aspects mentorship can be invaluable to new writers in both craft and access to whisper networks and information.
I can’t say why exactly it's so different now; a combination of Twitter, the world, and people’s offline routines changing dramatically post-pandemic. Lockdowns stopped lives, but it also produced so many new ones, especially for creatives. People consumed art more than ever, but more significantly, they suddenly had the time—and permission—to pursue it. So not all our writing projects were indie folk-pop masterpieces produced with the National's Aaron Dessner, but I committed to finishing a book for the first time in 7 years.
I realised the other day that without Covid I likely wouldn't have become a writer, which is a weird thought now that it’s so much of my life. I would always have written, as I have since I was a kid. But to deliberately carve space for it, to chase it as a career—that was unprecedented. I was enabled by time, space, and by finding community and resources that made me realise it was possible. In 2021-2022 I managed to finish manuscripts, get an agent with one of them, and sell that book. A lot of author friends who joined Twitter or (re)discovered writing then have similar stories. I occasionally wonder if the decline is partly because the large influx at the time brought with us big freshman orientation energy, and now we’ve graduated into natural cynicism and more private friendships without a similarly-sized influx to take our place.
But to be really honest I do wonder what would be if I hadn't sold my book or gotten an agent when I did. As much as both those things absolutely do not define worth, I'd be lying to say it doesn't give me motivation or reassurance (or contractual obligation) to keep at it and have the endurance and emotional wellbeing for publishing's waiting games and circumstance. I started working full time just before I sold the book, it’s now hard to imagine maintaining this same time and energy to writing year after year without a tangible purpose.
This isn't an attempt at poor-meing on hypotheticals. I’ve been incredibly lucky. This is more of a eulogy for a time that brought so many people, especially young people around me, into books again and into literal book deals, now feeling like it was lightning in a bottle. Now it feels fractured and writing was already an isolating thing to start. Even having got to this stage, it feels like I’ve missed the best time for promo, for engagement on announcements and cover reveals (even though I know social media doesn’t really move the needle!)
While I do think we all generally need to touch grass more, it’s valid to feel a special connection to online writers who get it, to yearn for those relationships or mourn the loss of its access, since most people aren’t lucky enough to find that support irl. Despite its downsides and discourse, it’s empowered marginalised communities and those outside the US to find peers and connect to the scene. It shares resources, visualises pathways and aspirations. It’s been critical to so many of us entering and staying in publishing, and I won’t pretend like it’s not sad to feel it deteriorate. The could’ve-beens of just getting in a little faster (to revisions, to querying, even to tiktok) will always haunt.
I’ve been thinking about community a lot in the past year or two, which is a very new-adult experience; suddenly removed from the structure and in-built social group of school, you start realising adult relationships are really lonely, and really hard. I, like all the other pandemic graduates, also ended that time of my life earlier and more abruptly than expected. In 2020, I’d found an environment in uni that made me feel like the best version of myself, one that felt so drenched in possibility and confident of her ability to carry them out. I was surrounded by people who loved what I loved and who made me believe for the first time you could structure your life around things you were passionate about. Then Covid happened, and I moved out of the continent back home.
I wrote the first draft of The Dark We Know in the month I graduated, June 2021, by which I mean I clicked submit on my final dissertation while sitting at home and was pretty sure I hadn’t failed and that was it, my time as a student was over. I was very sad and lonely and sitting with what I hadn’t yet named as grief. I was listening to a song about this boy’s dead friends appearing as ghosts to convince him to keep living, about those you’ve known and lost still walk behind you, and I suddenly had the image of this boy who sees ghosts and his last living childhood friend, a troubled girl who ran away to art school, coming back to save them. Back then, it was still called Those You’ve Known.
So at its core this book is dedicated to those people, to relationships held in short rosy nostalgia that you know will never be the same going forward. But there’s also a layer of exploring an isolation from a small community you grew up in—especially and specifically when it’s ordered around a religion. Because in that event, to leave the church is not just to stop identifying as part of that religion; it’s to leave a fundamental tie to quite literally the entire community you grew up in, without a single relationship outside of it.
I didn’t know I was writing about that until I was. In the first drafts, the church was just an environmental element classic to conservative small towns. It’s present in the source Spring Awakening too, but it’s not overtly relevant. Then in the summer of 2021, just before I sold the book, I read Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us, about a trans boy running from a post-apocalyptic christofascist armageddon cult, and a particular paragraph of the main character trying to pray unlocked a deep-seated thing in me that I’d come to terms with a long time ago but never explored in writing.
Once I found that opening… suddenly TDWK was kind of a religious book. Or at least, now the context is steeped in it, even if it doesn’t directly impact the plot. A lot of the book revolves around isolation and the subsequent power of connection. The main character, Isa, is forced to come back to the hometown she feels fundamentally alienated from. Because of her abusive home and dead friends and the fact that she’s queer, yes, but as I realised, also because she feels inherently unable to share the faith that forms the fabric of the town and the way people relate to one another. There’s a monster haunting the town and she feels like one of them. (Luckily, obviously, there’s a smartass boy from her childhood who sees ghosts and doesn’t believe in god and really, desperately wants her help to stop the actual monster, and they’re two of the only people who really see each other despite the old teenage problems that now seem trivial in hindsight.)
Since this is an elegy I guess I do mourn. I wrote a whole book about losing people, about the grave of childhood innocence and wishing you had more time but knowing you couldn’t make the same of it anyway because of how you’ve changed in the meantime. Maybe this writing twitter thing isn’t that serious and maybe it is. I see you, if you feel like you missed out on something. I don't think you're alone at all. Something feels like it's shifted there irreparably, and we’re waiting to see what comes next.
Still, people are there, if more scattered; opportunities are still there. People still care. We share about work we love and tell the creators so, we get excited over cool art and ideas, we offer guidance and critiques and cheerleading, we share universal experiences of having read the same thing, we find ways to pull other people together. Maybe I’m just over my nihilistic era, idk. Revoke my gen z card or whatever, I’m not actually a slut for death. I try to nurture the good things instead of catastrophising. To hold grief but also take it in stride. We’ll be ok. We’re stubborn about it. There’s always been an after. (I wrote a book about that too.)
While we’re talking about supporting each other, here are some other books you can start preordering from young writers debuting in 2024: Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao, The Last Bloodcarver by Vanessa Le, The Curse of Eelgrass Bog by Mary Averling, Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi, Where The Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek, Maya’s Laws of Love by Alina Khawaja, The Principle of Moments by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, The Girlfriend Act by Safa Ahmed.
currently consuming
Recent books I’ve loved included:
The Honeys by Ryan La Sala — I just. love mean rich girls and bizarre surreal atmospheres. This definitely took a weirder turn than I was expecting but it’s decadent and saccharine and delicious.
Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power (audiobook) - again, I love weird maternal shit and complicated, slightly toxic relationships. I guessed the plot twist about 30% of the way through because it was so aggressively exactly how I would’ve done it.
Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury, slow but delicious. I’d say not to go in expecting the usual snappy horror pacing. It’s a deep sink with a great haunted house and commentary on forgotten Black girls.
I read this in like August but I have to screech about Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield after also pushing it onto other people. I’ll be thinking about those vibes forever; surreal and strange but also so tender and quiet; the reading experience itself felt like a descent.
Now that I’m off deadline and no longer bound to making sure the things I read don’t throw me off my book’s headspace, I’m determined to catch up on some netgalley ARCs and new releases I’ve really wanted to get to, including:
I Feed Her To The Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea — sometimes the French deserve to be rampaged by a Black ballet girlie who made a deranged deal with a blood river demon for success
The Scarlet Alchemist by Kylie Lee Baker — I was obsessed with the visceral bits of Kylie’s debut The Keeper of Night and this book promises a lot more of that, SO
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski — the aftermath of a girl’s mysterious death as told through ten women in her small community. I’m interested in something tender and feminine while also a little more structurally experimental, so I’m excited to get to this.
The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham — gothic literary horror set during the Korean War with, again, weird maternal shit. As I wrote so succinctly to my friends when I found the synopsis of this book: