Writing Social Media Into Fiction

Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.

As writers, many of us have a pretty good idea of how we should feel about social media: It is a scourge, a waste of our time, a thief of every creative second . . . and, occasionally, a great place to meet other writers and promote our work. We know social media encourages anger, promoting the posts most likely to drive engagement, no matter the turmoil that such engagement may cause. We shudder at weekly screen time reports. We tweet things we later regret. We promise to detox on the heels of lengthy, public announcements advising our followers to email us if they need us, that DMs are closed—and then we promptly check our DMs, disappointed no one has written. Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer. But like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close rather than push it away.

I am not advocating for a full-scale acceptance of social media use as a writer. It’s probably best to log on sparingly, lest you melt into a puddle of rage and anxiety while serving the interests of big tech. But as much as we would like to avoid social media and its many ills, the technology is not going anywhere, and any writer looking to accurately portray modern life will likely have to engage with it in their work.

Every piece of fiction is as much about inclusion as it is about exclusion. Many novels are right to keep social media out of their pages for the same reason some authors ought to include it: for consistency and believability. These are the authors of ancient fantasy epics and founding father biographies and novels about gruff bearded men who live in the woods. This essay is not for those writers, but for the writers curious about how social media might best contribute to an authentic fictional world. Social media offers far more than temporal markers for those who wish to capture modern life; it serves as a vital method for creating plot, character, setting, and emotional stakes. Social media is, unfortunately, the stuff of literature. Here are four examples of how social media might best serve a piece of fiction.

Social Media in (Predominantly) Realist Fiction

Mary South’s “You Will Never Be Forgotten” is the title story from her 2020 debut collection. In it, a young woman, known only as “the woman,” splits her days between working as a content moderator at “the world’s most popular search engine” and stalking, across his various social media feeds, the athletic entrepreneur who raped her.

Throughout “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” social media is an extension of the protagonist’s interiority. After accidentally liking one of the rapist’s posts, “she reach[es] a new personal best in self-hatred, just as the rapist was reaching a new personal best in his triathlon.” On its surface, this is a fairly common description of shame magnified by another person’s accomplishments. But South pushes this idea a bit further, as the woman wonders whether the rapist will consider her unintentional like “proof that the rape was consensual.”

This passage appears in the story’s opening paragraph, and it makes clear that social media will have an outsized impact on how characters exist in real life. Something as innocuous as a single like takes on enormous consequences and risks. As the story continues, the line between social media and real life blurs, and a full portrait of the woman emerges.

As a content moderator, she has little control over her life. She spends her days viewing “hate speech, gore, torture, pornography both adult and child, horrific traffic accidents, executions carried out by terrorists.” Her relationship to the internet and social media is almost entirely traumatic—she absorbs trauma so others will not. Seeking autonomy, the woman finds it offline: “The woman doesn’t ‘follow’ the rapist on social media, but she does follow him in real life.” Internet stalking intensifies into real-world stalking, and by the end of the story, the woman must confront how little control she actually has over her life. By the end of the story, readers understand that the medium through which she sought control and justice is the very thing that will render her powerless. South’s story is not a didactic cautionary tale about social media but a story of injustice, obsession, and vengeance and the dangers of all three.

In Lauren Oyler’s debut novel Fake Accounts, social media is both illusive and revealing of characters. The novel is delivered by an unnamed woman who discovers her boyfriend, something of a self-identified luddite, is running a popular right-wing conspiracy theory account on Instagram. Social media is a site of deception, a way for one character to hide himself from another, and, when the narrator finds her boyfriend’s profile, the medium through which his true self—“true” “self”—is exposed.

While the thematic role of social media is important in the novel, Oyler’s best writing comes when she treats social media interfaces as tactile objects worthy of scrutiny. After breaking into her boyfriend’s phone, the narrator

tapped one of the icons, Instagram, and a familiar layout expanded to fit the screen. A row of circular user photos along the top indicated accounts that had posted Stories, photos that would disappear within twenty-four hours, images I thought, out of an abundance of caution, I shouldn’t view; if I looked, they would later show up at the end of the row without an ombré ring around them, suggesting that someone else had watched them.

Oyler is writing about a process most readers already know very well: how it feels to sign in to Instagram. However, by slowing down and focusing on the minute details of the interface, by describing, for the reader, what might happen if she views a story, Oyler defamiliarizes this common activity and renders it new. She fairly easily could have had her narrator sign in to Instagram and skip over everything that we already understand about the app. But by defamiliarizing, Oyler suggests that social media is a valuable setting for authors to explore, not merely as a thematic and abstract obsession but as a physical space. After all, if characters are spending so much time online, it ought to be treated like setting—no different from a quirky coffee shop or a bucolic trail through the forest.

Social media offers far more than temporal markers for those who wish to capture modern life.

Social Media as the Gateway to Genre

While both South and Oyler make use of social media in recognizable worlds, Joss Lake’s Future Feeling and Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen use social media as an access point to uncanny, fantastical realms.

In Future Feeling, a trans man named Pen tries to hex a trans influencer named Aiden because the latter seems to have bypassed all the emotional turmoil that normally comes with transition. The hex, as one might expect, goes terribly wrong. Instead of hexing Aiden, an innocent trans man gets caught in the crosshairs, and Pen and the influencer are forced to enter the shadowlands—a fantastical realm that literalizes transition—to save the man Pen has hexed. Morgan’s novel follows a similar path, albeit with shades of “me and my partner saw you from across the bar and liked your vibe.” Remy and Alicia, a couple on the rocks, rebuild their relationship through a shared obsession with their former coworker, Jen. They ingratiate themselves into her life, and their desire, practiced at a distance, turns into a threat once they all come into close proximity.

In these two texts, social media is a tunnel into much-more-troubling settings. The initial connection between the characters in these novels is superficial and safe—but once they venture beyond social media, the worlds around them shift away from realism toward something magical or horrific.

Rather than avoiding social media in their work, writers can use it to mark transitions between worlds and reveal character. Social media is uncanny—we spend time in a place that does not exist pretending to be our best selves. That uncanniness can help shape a world, however, when characters—as in Lake’s and Morgan’s books—must confront each other offline. How can the weirdness of seeing someone anew, offline, create tension between who characters truly are and how they present? How might the clash of worlds—online with off—give rise to a surreal, unpredictable world from which the characters cannot escape?

Social Media as Narrator

In A. E. Osworth’s We Are Watching Eliza Bright, social media is both absent and omnipresent. The novel tells the story of Eliza, a female video game programmer who loses her job after filing a sexual harassment complaint against two male colleagues. Though, on its surface, the book appears to be told through a third-person omniscience, Osworth’s narrator is actually a collection of internet trolls brought together through a message board.

Early in the novel, the narrators announce themselves: “Even the most villainous among us would, in the end, choose to protect the city. If you see something, say something, and all that bullshit. Well. We would say something. Because we love it here. It is a novel place. Endless space.” Osworth creates a collection of speakers that believes in its own purpose and righteousness. This narrator—or narrators—captures the extensive scope and the limits of assumed omniscience. The narrators are limited, but they do not consider themselves so. They believe in their power to perceive and to understand; their confidence makes them dangerous.

In We Are Watching Eliza Bright, the narration has both a functional and philosophical purpose. Functionally, the speakers see into Eliza’s life—the speakers are a group of men who pass her on the street and at work or stalk her online—and provide commentary, like the narrator of a nineteenth-century novel casting judgment on the other characters. But Osworth’s narrator, flawed and unwilling to recognize its flaws, is also a critique of social media and the toxic communities that come together online. The narrators are hyper vigilant and limited in their perspective. The reader is not supposed to take everything they say as authentic truth but must also accept that this is the only truth that they are receiving.

The book is not an escape from social media—as we all foolishly tell ourselves books will be—but a reinscribing of the very things that make truth so difficult to establish online. In this instance, social media as narrator offers a variation on the classic trope of the unreliable narrator. This narrator is not unreliable; narration itself is unreliable, and what emerges is false omniscience. In reading Osworth’s book, we are shown how social media can create an opportunity to reimagine narration, even as it recreates what can feel most maddening about being online. Being on Twitter, for instance, can often feel like watching a parade of half-truths and misinformation, but for a writer looking to challenge the notion of truth, these kinds of conflicting narratives offer an exciting way to tell stories. How might a story narrated only through Instagram comments be told? What about a story told only through subtweets? Social media offers countless ways to expand our understanding of narration.

Social Media as Literary Form

As deeply as We Are Watching Eliza Bright models itself after online discourse, it still maintains a fairly traditional form—albeit with a few brief chapters comprised only of direct messages. In Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing, however, social media commandeers the form of the novel, as the reader is immersed in a book-length Slack conversation between employees at a public relations firm in New York.

The novel opens after Gerald, a middling employee at the firm, becomes trapped in Slack. While Gerald’s body remains upright at his home computer, in something like a coma, his consciousness cannot escape from the app. Even after he tells his coworkers—and Slackbot—about his dilemma, they are quick to dismiss his story. Kasulke uses the situation and the form to enhance character and stakes. Talking to his colleagues, Gerald understands how absurd this all sounds, and his colleagues are quick to assume his story is merely an attempt to work from home without suffering professional consequences.

Social media is uncanny—we spend time in a place that does not exist pretending to be our best selves.

What makes this form work is that Kasulke is careful to distinguish between the voices of the characters. Traditionally, dialogue is one of the most effective ways to reveal character in fiction: Learning how a character talks tells us so much about who they are. But talking is not limited to annunciation, and in Several People Are Typing, typed dialogue stands in for the dialogue a reader might normally find in a novel. The characters come to life not only through their voices, but how they uniquely respond to the same situation.

Kasulke’s decision to tell the entire novel through Slack is risky, but the form works because it relies on a fixed constraint. There are limits to what Kasulke can include. There are no extended physical descriptions of characters—except for when one man discovers Gerald’s body and describes the physical changes—and even though some of them hook up, the scenes are delivered after the fact, through retellings and requests to keep what happened a secret. Countless novels have reckoned with the soul-crushing impact of spending your life returning to the same office five days a week, but Several People Are Typing literalizes the fear that many of those novels can only imply: What if the job actually sucks your soul into itself? Social media, then, is not a limiting factor, but a way to reinvent a story that has begun to grow stale after many retellings. What other tropes—the stranger coming to town, the cheating husband, the road trip novel—might be reimagined through the constraints of social media?

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Over the years, I’ve been in a few workshops where the consensus was that writers shouldn’t include social media and modern technology for fear of dating their work. The conventional wisdom was that technology changes too rapidly, and that future readers might find the work stale or, worse, indecipherable. Though I may very well be proven wrong should the books above become “unreadable” over the next decade, writers like South, Oyler, Lake, Morgan, Osworth, Kasulke, and so many others are showing us that social media is an effective tool for enhancing traditional literary elements like character, theme, plot, form, and setting. Sure, social media might steal away hours of great writing time—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth writing about. There are ways we can expand our creativity by writing about online experiences, rather than feeling drained or resentful toward the hours we spend scrolling. Social media companies exploit our attention for profit, so it’s only fair that writers exploit their products to create unpredictable, surreal, and exciting new worlds in fiction.