I’ve learned to really enjoy Twitter. I’ll admit I was completely non-plussed initially but having discovered the thriving and supportive reading and writing communities, it’s now one of my favourite places to engage. Besides, where else would I go to get my fix of ranty historical fact threads or cat videos?
That said, there are times when Twitter can be an absolute dumpster fire. The very format that makes it so engaging, that allows information to be disseminated so quickly, means that it’s really easy to marshal a mob in record time. If you’ve ever witnessed a Titter pile-on, you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, perhaps you’ve read The Crucible by Arthur Miller? Leaving aside the question of deliberate misuse of power, or the exercise of plausible lies out of fear, it’s comparatively easy to start a ‘witch hunt’ through sheer thoughtlessness.
Last week, well known YA author Sarah Dessen tweeted a screen shot of a clipping from an article which seemed to be slamming her, together with her emotive response.
A 2017 English Graduate of Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota, was quoted in a short 10yr Anniversary article, featured in the Aberdeen News, as explaining that she had joined the college’s ‘Common Reads‘ program in order to prevent Dessen’s work being chosen. The punchy and somewhat unwisely phrased quote included the following;
“She’s fine for teen girls. But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”
Dessen’s response quoted with the screenshot:
“Authors are real people. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good. “
There’s already a lot to unpack there, and we haven’t even hit the real insanity yet. As an author, I’m going to go out on a limb and say no author actually wants to read a quote like that about themselves in any article ever. (This is why you should NEVER google yourself. Seriously.) However, a reader has the right to have an opinion about your work without you weighing in on it. Sometimes, that really sucks. Sometimes it’s awesome. But the golden rule if you’re an author, is that you don’t engage with negative reviews because they are not for you. Similarly, if a reader has a negative opinion about your writing, it’s nothing to do with you.
It bears driving home like a railroad spike so I’ll rephase; What someone else thinks of you is none of your business. That goes for all sorts of things, not just writing of course, and if you can pull off being someone you like and want to hang out with, without caring too much what anyone else thinks, you’ll have a much happier life. Dessen is an experienced author; an adult woman in her forties. Yes criticism sucks, but it was her books being criticised, not her personally. She should have just left it alone or bitched quietly and privately to a friend. We all do on occasion and that’s fine. Her big mistake was serving it up for public consumption.
At this point in narrative, I will freely hold my hand up and say that I saw the original tweet and felt the same surge of outrage many others did. Which no doubt we were meant to feel having been shown something that was quoted out of context and incomplete. I have a ongoing embargo on engaging in Twitter take-downs, social media draggings, trials in the court of public opinion or public shamings of any kind. If I did not have that basic never to be deviated golden rule, I could tyeoretically have ended up being drawn into what turned into an episode of shameful online bullying. I don’t know Dessen. I haven’t read her books. I don’t especially like YA contemporary fiction. But it wasn’t hard to imagine myself or my writer friends in Dessen’s place. It was presented emotively by someone who is well known and about whom social evidence suggests ‘this person is in the right’. In other words, someone with power.
While Brooke Nelson, the college student who spoke the offending words, was intemperate, phrasing herself in a way that suggested both that Dessen was a mediocre writer and that anything written for teenage girls is inferior (something which is a huge hot button topic in the bookish community btw), it’s still just an opinion and she’s entitled to both hold it and vocalise it. It’s also worth bearing in mind that she was one voice on a selection committee and that previously selected book titles have included several YA books including Angie Sage’s The Hate You Give. On this occasion, the book chosen instead of Dessen’s, was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson – deconstructing a justice system where a man was unjustly imprisoned for being black.
However you slice it, it already wasn’t a good look for Dessen. Except that very few people, myself included (initially), did not track the original article and read the quote in context before reacting, whether that reaction was private or public. In my case, yes there was a hint of laziness but after my initial ‘what a dick move’ reaction, I assumed that Dessen was letting off steam, rather pitied her for doing it so publicly (I am just not an emotional person) and thought she would move on. I had no idea that the fall out would include two and a half days of concerted online harassment for Nelson, who was apparently all too easily trackable. The problem was not merely that Dessen had circulated a partial screenshot, or that it was deliberately misleading, or even that she had tackled the issue in an emotive way that cast her as the victim. The problem was that Dessen tweeted it out to 246,000 odd followers.
Let’s add some context. It’s generally considered that if you have over 2000 twitter followers and sell 5000 books, then you are considered an ‘influencer‘. In other words, you have the power to shape public opinion.
It snowballed from there. The tweet was picked up by several very high profile authors who shared it and commented on it and threw support behind Dessen. And all of them did it without checking the original article. Look, I get it. We trust our friends. The author community is small and tightly knit, and women, POC and queer authors band even closer together because we so often get sidelined or attacked. There’s also the perception that if we know an author’s work or we saw them in an interview or heard them on a podcast, that we know the author. They feel like a friend. In reality, we don’t know them. We cannot assume we are being told the whole truth. And I say this in the full knowledge that it took me 24hrs to check out the source material when I realised the situation hadn’t died down.
Since then, Dessen has issued a very lukewarm apology. Several other authors have also issued apologies. Of those authors, whom I will not name because I really don’t see the point of perpetuating this cycle any further, several of them are authors I personally admire and I am shocked by things they have said during this incident. Every one screws up. Hopefully when it’s your turn, it won’t be so bad your career can’t come back from it. Suffice to say many previously well respected authors currently have egg on their faces. I want to believe that Dessen acted rashly and foolishly but that she didn’t deliberately weaponize her fans and incite mob behaviour against a twenty-something, who blurted her opinion in a way that I might have done myself at her age. We’ll probably never know for sure, so I choose to live in the world where Dessen’s actions were thoughtless and ill advised rather than malicious. But there are plenty of authors who most definitely have bullied fans and other authors; who have used their platform to remove or harrass competition; who’ve painted themselves as the victim, pointed at someone else who actually had far less power and metaphorically said ‘witch’. This behaviour needs to stop.
Which brings me back to my main point. You can have a tiny fan base and seemingly non existent social media presence, but if you write and your writing touches someone, you have far more power than you think. So think. Use it wisely.
Want to read more? Check out these sources for a full break down: