Story needs no platform

I left Facebook in 2017 and Twitter in 2018, for many reasons but most because I don’t like who I am on social media, the person I become when I engage too much: snarky, judgmental, every now and then downright mean. I left Instagram in 2020 because I was tired of pretending to create a false public “self” in the midst of a family crisis. But whenever I talk with writer friends about my abandonment of social media and their desire to do the same, the issue of “platform” nearly always comes up. Writers need, we’re told, a solid social media following so that our stories can be seen, noticed, read, and shared. Most of all shared. If our stories are shared, they can get more followers and the platform will grow until it’s unassailable, leading to speaking engagements and book sales. Or something. I’ve never been sold on the idea that social media is an effective platform for most of us. If you’re an influencer, of course, that’s one thing and that thing is basically your job, but unless a writer has tens of thousands of followers to begin with, an active social media account doesn’t generally seem to make much of a difference—and research has shown that large followings even into the millions don’t generally correlate to, say, book sales, in any case—and the effort involved in building that kind of platform often detracts from the time and focus required to do the actual work. That’s not true of everyone, obviously. Some writers do incredible work and also run fabulous, smart social media accounts. Plenty of us don’t, and likely shouldn’t try, though it’s hard to resist putting the effort in when you’re constantly hammered with the Siren call: “You need a platform!” Maybe the question we should ask ourselves is whether those with massive social media followings are doing it because they’re building and maintaining a platform (the more I type that word the more images of deep-sea oil rigs come to mind), or because they enjoy engaging with readers and the general public online in a variety of ways. I suspect it’s the latter, though with some they’re obviously just hooked on the attention. There has always been a fundamental struggle between the act of writing and the sharing or promotion of it. But once you approach a work with readers in mind, your relationship to it changes. The work itself changes. When I was in graduate school, this shift was often spoken of scornfully, as if Art were demeaned by the wish to share it, to publish. In one class the teacher said explicitly that the minute you get paid for your art, it becomes a commodity. I saw a lot of depressed faces in class that day. The word “commodity” is definitely a killjoy for creativity and I’m no fan of mass commodification, but we all need to eat and we all have our skills and talents to contribute. Money just happens to be how we currently exchange things of value. I don’t know where or when this attitude developed, that writing, if it is to be Art, shouldn’t be published, much less paid for. Story, after all, is one of humankind’s oldest and most enduring technologies. Stories are meant to be shared; they aren’t crafted solely for the storyteller herself. My first draft of anything is always written for me first. Even this newsletter goes down in a notebook so I can dump out all my messy ideas before letting anyone else have a look-in. But the moment I begin transferring the words from the page to the screen, I begin thinking of readers. If I didn’t, why bother with any of this in the first place? In a way, writers are often tricked into thinking that social media is part of this process, essential to bringing your work to others’ eyes and ears. But I’ve found that each platform I’ve been on deflated my creative work in its own unique way, and all of them gobbled up the spaces in my brain where creativity happens, or at least that’s what it felt like. Social media connected me with a lot of great people; it took a long time to realize that it was also invading the time solely by myself with a notebook that I needed to create anything that I felt worthwhile. It drowned out wherever it is that Story comes from until I couldn’t hear it anymore. That said, when I was revising my first book (https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-walking-life-reclaiming-our-health-and-our-freedom-one-step-at-a-time-antonia-malchik/6464959?ean=9780738234885&next=t) , the one constant question I faced myself with was, “At what point will a reader put this down to go check Facebook?” Social media will continue to change writing even if every writer abandons it, because readers’ minds and attention will still be shaped by it. My mother, who’s a singer-songwriter of cowboy songs, once talked to me about Story that picks you up by the scruff of the neck and takes you off into the night. Mythologist Martin Shaw, in an excerpt from one of his books, speaks of Story as a kind of echolocation from Earth itself, hoping to find someone who’s tuned in. ...