I sent a tweet.
Now you may be sitting there reading this and thinking… big deal… so what. You sent a tweet? 6500 tweets are sent every second, that’s 350,000 every minute, about 500 million tweets per day… What makes this one so special?
It started with a webinar hosted by Gotham Writers, a writing school out of NY City. I’ve been looking for ways into the writing community, into finding my voice as a writer. I signed up for a Nonfiction Creative Writing class through Gotham Writers that starts in July, and because of that, I’ve been getting emails about other classes that they offer. In one of those emails, I found a free webinar series called Inside Writing that is a sort of Q&A with literary agents. I figured I would join today and see what was what. Without realizing it, the webinar today was focused on memoir writing, the exact genre that the book I want to write will be in.
The class was great! Although it caused me to feel excited and overwhelmed at the same time. I want to do this, but how do I do this. I’ve started writing, but should I re-write? Does what I’ve written thus far contain the message that I want to get across? Is it marketable? Would an audience be able to connect? So many questions and anxious thoughts running through my head!!!!
At the end of the webinar, the leader mentioned that we can tweet our memoir pitch with a specific hashtag and they will forward their favorites onto the agent.
So I sent a tweet: One evening my mom told me she had a son she put up for adoption 50 yrs prior and he had found her/us via DNA testing. I talked to him, met him and found something I had been missing. Less than a year later he tragically died.
Why is it scary? I just gave voice to a dream. What if the agent likes it? That means I have to write this, I have to actually do this. Even if I never hear from the agent, I’ve made the next step. There’s action towards the writing and publishing of a book about the 3 craziest years of my life.
Charlotte on Books 