"rock art" by joy laskar

I’ve become an avid follower of the hashtag #amwriting on Twitter. Writers typically use it to indicate they’re currently in the process of writing, although some add it to anything they post about the practice of writing.
Of course, a lot of #amwriting tweets are structured around the verb phrase “am writing,” e.g., “I #amwriting until I have to go to work.”

Tweeting grammatically correct sentences with any particular verb phrase is harder than you’d think, even for writers. Because I’m a writer, I #amwriting a lot, (I lucked out there) and I have more to say than obediently adhering to “am writing” allows.

Twitter’s 140-character limit encourages creative usage of grammar, such as trimming unnecessary words and abbreviating spellings, but #amwriting tweeters go even further. Someone might write, “Kids woke early from nap; #amwriting time got cut short.” In this example, #amwriting replaces the noun form of “writing,” again to identify the practice of writing. The word “writing” would make sense in this context, but #amwriting leaves little doubt, emphasizing that the verb in this noun is not mere residue.

There’s honesty in this phenomenon that gets beneath the superficial crap of grammar. The ongoing #amwriting stream and the discussions within it address the challenges a writer faces as she accumulates words, deletes some of those words, rearranges what’s left, adds new, and continues doing all of that in no particular order until she has created a polished, publishable work. Why should she obsess about what others think of her work when she’s still developing ideas, structure, arguments, etc., that are the higher-order concerns of a piece of writing.

Grammar and usage (a.k.a., lower- or later-order concerns) are not irrelevant, but there’s not much point in obsessing about comma usage, for example, if you’re still figuring out the main argument. You’ve got to prioritize use of #amwriting time (so you don’t run out of it too soon) and energy (so you can replenish it as you go along).

What I like best is the sense of community within the #amwriting stream. Almost every writer I’ve known has complained about isolation. We do need a lot of time by ourselves, but too much time alone gets exhausting. We write about characters and other people’s ideas, and we want people to read and buy our books. If the products we write are so people-centered, why shouldn’t #amwriting be, too?
Sorry to blog and bail. I #amwriting a novel and need to get back to #amwriting it.

James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in comparative literature at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota. He contributes to the BWW weekly!