MFA Writing Colloquium: The Enemy You Know: Writing Social Media into Fiction with Isle McElroy

Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of writers-it steals our time, it loosens our thoughts, it clips our sentences. However, like any good enemy, we might benefit from bringing it closer, borrowing the very elements that make it so time-consuming in the first place. In this craft intensive, writers will study excerpts from recent fictions that explore how social media might appear in a variety of texts: as character development, defamiliarization, a formal experiment, a gateway to genre, and more. Generative craft exercises will show writers how to employ these same writing strategies in their prose. For better or worse, social media doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and authors looking to capture the hectic nature of contemporary life can benefit from using elements of social media to texture and intensify their fiction.

Isle McElroy is a non-binary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, was published in September. Other writing appears in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere.