It’s five o’clock on a Thursday and the usual crowd is driving to the CT Tweet Crawl. It is a diverse group of people that gather every so often who are united by little more than their common use of Twitter. I’ve been going to Tweet Crawls, Tweetups, and other social media gatherings for years. It used to be much more geeks talking about some wild idea for a new website. The content producers started showing up, the bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers. Finally, the marketing people caught on with their nice suits and a chance to exchange business cards.

I’m listening to All Things Considered on the radio as I drive up. They are talking about William Faulkner and I think about novel writing. Every year I give National Novel Writing Month a try, and one year I completed the novel, but never got around to editing it.

I’m thinking to myself, “What do I have to say to this upcoming gathering? What do they have to say to me?” I anticipate the first question I will hear from many people, “So, what do you do?” I eat, I drink, I sleep, sometimes I write or manage to find interesting technology projects that pay the bills, but that isn’t concise enough for this crowd and people won’t want to swap cards with me. I could say that I’m quick with a joke, or to light up a smoke but people would then assume that there’s some place that I’d rather be.

Years ago, I spoke with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. It occurred to me that the best way to describe what I do is to say that I “help people tell their stories online.” With this in mind, the words of William Faulkner rattling around in my head and a little Billy Joel somehow slipping in, I decided on my new job description. “I’m an Internet Novelist”.

Yeah, it’s a little different from Bill’s friend the Real Estate Novelist. I’ve had time for a wife, although she may sometimes get frustrated at the amount of time that I am online. So, at the TweetCrawl, I use the phrase. I get polite nods as people seem to get it, exchange business cards and move on. Only one person seems to object. He points out that novels are supposed to be long form fiction. A lot of social media is very short form, and by novel standards, even a long blog post is short form. In addition, social media people are supposed to be writing about what is really going on, not some fiction.

While I’m a big advocate of truth and authenticity online, it seems as if a good social media presence is concerned with the narrative, with taking all the bits and pieces of life and weaving it into an interesting story. Hopefully, the story isn’t fiction, but becomes true in the telling of the story.

So, there you have it. I’ve told my story of being an Internet Novelist, and hopefully telling this story makes it a little bit true. It certainly made the discussions at the CT Tweetup more interesting. On the way home, I listened to Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviewed Loudon Wainwright. He talked some about his father being a journalist for Life magazine and how he had bought into the notion that you need to write a book to be a serious writer. Maybe I’ll end up buying into the same notion, but until then I’ll keep up my various forms of internet writing and hope to weave them into interesting stories.