Not Getting Swallowed Up By Social Media Pressure

In a world buzzing with connections many are feeling more under the microscope than ever before. Social media has opened the door to building worldwide communities for shared interests, having friends and family constantly in connection, and of course, pressure.

From all sides opinions reign on what you should and should not be achieving. Comparisons with other people, and their achievements, scattered across your screen.

Unlike real world conversations the comparisons we draw with people on social media are entirely face value. There is no conversation of circumstances.

All I know is that Jenny, 21 from Bristol, successfully wrote 10,000 words of her new novel today, while I sat here in my pyjamas eating cake and watching Netflix.

Studies have already shown that seeing the holidays and adventures of our friends and family on social media can make us depressed about our own lives, so what about the pressure on our careers and hobbies?

In the world of creative writing, where practically everyone will make a punt at least once in their lives, the pressure is outstanding. Competitions, encouraging people to write a book in a month, are scattered across the internet, some more successful than others, and garner a lot of interest. While these may be positive for some budding writers in the world, they can hold a negative effect on others. The crippling realisation that a few thousand other people can, supposedly, write a whole novel in a month, stands starkly against your own nature to spend at least a year on the first draft.

Then you have the ‘inspirational’ posts. These colourful bursts of pressure pop up on your feed advising you to set ‘goals’, goals such as ‘write at least 1,000 words a day’; completely ignoring the fact that most people can’t afford to write at all during the day and are reliant on holidays, weekends and all-nighters to get any time to hit the keys.

Other posts offer inspirational people up as tribute; a whole conversation of how Lucy, 18, managed to write a whole book in three months, all the way through to editing, and published it herself only for it to be picked up and turned into a blockbuster film before the end of the year. If you’re anything like me these kinds of articles are the sort that result in large amounts of comfort eating while questioning why my manuscript won’t even sell, let alone become a world-wide phenomenon, all the while hating Lucy for having achieved these dreams while being younger than me.

While all of these pressures are thrown in our faces by the social media whirlwind, the worst kind is the one we put on ourselves.

Today we are advised to put our work out into the world. The promises of platforms like Wattpad in getting found by an audience, and leading to ‘The Kissing Booth’ style recognition, draw us in, only to leave us struggling to publish chapters to any kind of regular schedule and wondering why we only have 26 overall reads while Frank’s ongoing story gets thousands per day, despite the fact that, in your humble opinion, it’s written terribly and is a total rip-off idea.

All of this pressure mounts and turns into evening sessions, staring at the analytics page asking ourselves, ‘What am I doing wrong?’

To scrolling through Facebook, seeing a writing challenge, joining it, only to fail to keep it up by day three and spending the rest of the month feeling awful for ‘falling behind’ everyone else.

Rather than sitting down and enjoying the process of writing, of falling into the worlds which we craft ourselves, we have been consumed by the pressure of comparison. Instead of feeling almighty for getting that first chapter written, we are feeling low for only getting out a few hundred words today instead of the thousand everyone else can do.

For these reasons we must stop. While joining in with the writing community, while getting our work out there in some way, is important and can be positive, comparing ourselves to others is not.

Writing, and all creative arts, are easy for others to judge. People who know nothing of the processes will likely ask if you’ve got your finished novel ‘published yet’, a week after you type the final line, with no understanding of the possible years ahead trying to get an agent, who will hopefully find you a publisher, who will likely want you to edit your book, all before finally seeing your finished work on the shelves.

Others, mostly those who have the time, will lord the fact that they can write so much in a day. However, for all we know, they’re writing is diabolical, and their only claim to writing fame will forever be the fact that they can produce over 20,000 words in one sitting.

As with all truly important things social media has no place in our judgment of our writing, for that we should refer to the things that truly matter to us, such as the work of our favourite authors, or the feedback from that most recent agent. When it comes to our progress we should only compare to ourselves. Today I wrote 1,000 words, we should say with glee, when we haven’t written a single word for the past month.

In a world of writing dreams it is paramount we ignore the stressors of social circles and the pressures of those who do not know how to weave magic.