To Facebook, or not to Facebook, that is the question that many people around the world have asked themselves recently. Personally, I love using Facebook to keep in touch with the large number of people I know in many different parts of the world, but that’s mostly because I’ve travelled a lot, lived overseas, and now teach people who return to their home countries, so it makes sense; someone who has most of their friends living within reach could quite easily convince me they didn’t see any use in it and would prefer to communicate in other ways.
But whether or not you choose to use Facebook as a way to keep in touch with your friends, I’d like to argue that it’s still a valuable tool for a writer. One of the most fascinating aspects of Facebook for me as a writer is, perhaps surprisingly, what others complain about as being mundane and boring: people providing regular updates on what’s happening in their lives, by typing in their so-called status updates. A random sample of (identity-hidden) updates from my Facebook friends a while ago reveals fiction-inspiring gems like these:
If only I had broken my teeth a week or two earlier I could have saved myself $700.
I had a bat in my bedroom and a snake in the chookhouse today.
T has just had the sort of conversation that only makes sense if you are two and a half.
Confucius say, “Man who run in front of car get tired. Man who run behind car get exhausted.”
Spending my two weeks child-free sick in bed was not the plan.
There’s a beach and a beer and a boat missing…
Isn’t this stuff what every writer loves – we’re eavesdropping on the daily lives of all different kinds of people, a bit like sitting in a cafe or a bus and listening to other people’s conversations. I can follow the daily intricacies of people in thirty or so countries, young and old, engineers, truck drivers, teachers, doctors, housewives, students, small business owners, flight attendants, you name it. I can already think of an example when some small incident I’d read about on Facebook became part of the background of a character in a story I was writing. So next time you hear a writer being dismissive of Facebook, just be glad that you might be the one getting all the inspiration and new ideas, and they’re missing out. That’s my theory anyway, apart from Facebook being a lot of fun. Being curious is a healthy and normal part of being a fiction writer (I like to tell myself!), and observing other people’s lives on Facebook is just another part of the puzzle of what goes into my head and eventually comes out as story.
Side note on Facebook’s value: Remember I posted about whether or not a writer’s friends read their work or not? Well, I put a link to this post on my Facebook page, which is read by a lot of my friends, and I got some fantastic feedback – I discovered a few more “lurking” readers, especially old high school friends who, without me realising it, have been reading quite a lot of my blog posts and articles. It was a nice surprise (despite the fact I’d just concluded it “wasn’t important” if my friends read my work or not) and gave me quite a boost. Obviously making a quick comment on Facebook is a lot faster for many people than getting into commenting on a blog, so it was really great to get that feedback. Facebook 2, Anti-Facebook 0.
