Twitter and creative writing: generating an 'authentic' online voice

In Creative Writing, it is considered important to have an ‘authentic’ voice, both in long form work (such as novels) and via online ‘author platforms’ that are intended to promote the work. However, if, as is often assumed, it is not possible for one person to have more than one ‘authentic’ voice, the task can look problematic. This chapter reports on a new small-scale pilot study in which Creative Writing students working on long form projects were invited to also generate online selves. With its low character-count, Twitter can free students to experiment. Thus, for the pilot study, Twitter was used from November 2017 to April 2018 with the aim of helping two groups of Creative Writing students at a UK University experiment with ideas of what constitutes an ‘authentic’ online self and develop skills in creating one. Student evaluation sheets enabled quantitative and qualitative assessment of the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogical method. The research, which adopts a teacher-practitioner stance, is located in the field of Creative Writing. However, confident and comfortable digital engagement is an important aspect of ‘digital inclusion’ more generally, and so the task of finding an appropriate, robust digital voice is relevant in other disciplines as well. Therefore, it is hoped that, in providing a pedagogical toolkit that can be replicated and ‘rolled out’, this chapter will prove to be a valuable contribution both in the field of Creative Writing and more widely.