Creative Writing for Social Media

Social media gets plenty of criticism for the harm it can bring to our lives. With its time-sucking stream of toxic content, dopamine-spiking strategies that command our attention and perhaps most corrosive of all, its ability to trigger endless comparison that erodes our sense of self-worth, there’s a lot not to like about it. 

But as with many things, there are other, more positive sides to it too. Social media platforms provide us with an ability to share our ideas and are also full of creative communities, allowing us to connect with like-minded souls around the world who can enrich our lives in numerous ways.

Staying out of the toxic soup requires careful curation, but there are many benefits available if we set the intention to make it a creative experience rather than a corrosive one.

I spent a happy couple of hours this morning learning to do just that in an online workshop delivered by London college City Lit.

Run by creative writing tutor Homan Yousofi of Inktrails, the workshop introduced us to a variety of short-form writing approaches, combining words, images, sounds, mixed-media and other techniques. Aimed at developing our confidence in combining ideas and having fun with words, images and video, we explored how to set up a social media creative writing page to publish poetry, collage, micro fiction, creative non-fiction and microblogging. 

Let’s Start Writing!

For our first exercise we were paired up in breakout rooms, and I was lucky to be partnered with the lovely Abu Dhabi-based Sabyn Javeri, author of Hijabistan and Nobody Killed Her. These beautiful vibrant cover designs would immediately catch my eye in a bookshop and make me want to pick them up and read them.

Our task was to select a photo from our mobile phone and describe our choice to one another, explaining what the memory meant to us, and any sounds, memories, textures or flashes of insight it brought up for us. 

We spent ten minutes discussing our subject matter, the concept of ‘Home’ in the context of transience and migration, before writing a short free-form poem that we could share with the rest of the group.

Time zones and geographical distance dissolved as we chatted and shared snippets about our lives and used them as material for our creative writing. It was amazing how quickly we were able to get some words down on the page that might become the the theme for a longer piece of work in the future.

Speedy Haikus

Our next exercise was to take a photograph of something inside our home (or outside in my case, it was a beautiful sunny morning and I wanted to see the sky). We then wrote a Haiku in response to the image.

The haiku is a Japanese poetry form that traditionally consists of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the third. Homan encouraged us to approach this exercise as ‘mindful noticing’, making the familiar unfamiliar again, and taking a turn or movement to shift to a wider noticing, a shift from the small to the large. 

The traditional 5/7/5 syllable Haiku structure imposes a firm container for your writing – it can take several re-writes to achieve, so let your words flow before you try to cut them back. The structure provides a sense of discipline as well as an opportunity to practice your editing skills!

Taking a photograph for inspiration is also a great way to develop your powers of observation and take time to slow down, shift perspective and pay attention to the tiny details as well as the broad themes of your chosen subject.

Creating Instagram Reels

I’ve spent enough time watching Instagram reels that I really should know how to create them by now, but this was my first experience. Homan gave us a quick explanation of the process and we then had ten minutes to create a series of short five-second videos, add captions and music and upload the finished result to our Instagram account.

As is often the case with technology, it was all a lot easier than I expected and I excitedly made my first reel – it was no work of creative genius but in just ten minutes I’d filmed a few quick videos of my desk, added captions and music and managed to upload it to my account.

I didn’t have much time to carefully craft my creative captions and I won’t win any awards for cinematography or literary merit, but as the saying goes, done is better than perfect and I can only improve!

The purpose of making creative writing reels is to allow yourself to play with scenes and the randomness that connects them, so this is a fun way to immerse yourself in an environment like an art gallery, museum or exhibition, or even just a walk in nature. It offers a way to record your experience and to push yourself to write about it in a less linear way than just putting words on the page.

Image Editing Apps

Homan also introduced us to various image editing apps that can be used to enhance and expand your visual and written creativity when making social media content. YouDoodle allows you to draw over your images, Inshot Video Editor can add text, and Adobe Aero looks fun for exploring augmented reality and combining it with sounds and 3D texts.

Instagram also has plenty of it’s own in-app features, and if you’re like me and not quite sure how Reels and Stories work, you’ll find plenty of tutorials available on YouTube.

In just a couple of hours we had a whistle-stop tour of ideas, strategies and technologies to try out, take away and explore, as well as a lot of fun learning new skills and an interesting way to approach our creative writing and curate our content.

If you’re not ready to share your work with the world you can set up a private Instagram account, so don’t let shyness stop you from trying out some of these ideas. It would be wonderful to look back a year from now and see a portfolio of your work and the ways your writing has developed!