On What I've Learned About Writing Online

Since 1996

The first writing I did for the internet was a serialized novel. The title was Ω.

Ω went out on the Guardian’s first, short-lived website, Shift Control, in 1996.

I had a collaborator, Bronwen Davies, who supplied hyperlinked footnotes (often more coherent and entertaining than the text).

The story was a science fiction caper set in NuCal, a futuristic California. (God, how I’d have hated it to be called a ‘caper’ back then.) It was influenced by Mark Leyner, Jeff Noon, Douglas Coupland and what I’d found washed up on the weirder shores of online. Imagine a Day-Glo mess fighting another Day-Glo mess.

The main thing I wanted to do, in terms of moving from paper pages to the screen, was keep the reader reading. This meant I needed to include something like a cliffhanger at the end of every 250 words. (I didn’t want mini-sections to be bigger than the screen itself. No scrolling necessary.)

This gave the whole novel an air of panic. So what I learned was —

Adapt to writing for screens, but don’t adapt too much.

In 1998, I worked with Pulp Books and three other writers – Darren Francis, James Flint, Penny J Cotton – on BabyLondon.

Here’s the blurb:

BabyLondon is a text-based hyperfiction website written by 4 young London-based authors, with London’s multiplicity as its theme… Britain’s first major hyperfiction site featuring crosslinked narratives, BabyLondon is not technically publishable in book form, as each path through the site is potentially unique with no two readers getting the text in the same order.

The idea of all this, from my side of things, was to steal readers. I wanted see if I could lure readers away from other narratives by putting hypertext links on the most enticing words they contained.

One section of this ended up being published separately as ‘Alphabed’ in Exhibitionism. It’s about a disintegrating couple having the worst imaginable sex. There are 26 sections, to be read randomly.

What I learned —

Hypertext is not the future.

By 1999, I decided it was time to start my own website – tobylitt.com – which I’ve been running, in one form or another, ever since. Its first slogan was ‘Thought-heavy, flash-light.’ This later became: ‘“a funny little website” – mysteriously popular on Wednesdays between 11 and 11.30am’. My favourite section was the Askings, in which I requested obscure information. (Those who know my Facebook posts will be familiar with this.)

What I learned —

If you ask people interesting enough questions, someone out there will give you the answer.

However, I still have some interesting but unanswered questions.

For example, When Michel Foucault visited San Francisco did he ever take time out from the bathhouses to visit Alcatraz? and Why does cheap, pulpy paperback paper go wavy and weird on airplane journeys?

The most widely-read thing I’ve done online, so far, is We Tell Stories. It was another collaboration, but this time with high-level technical support from games developer Six to Start. This ambitious project ended up winning Best in Show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Web Awards 2009 in Austin, Texas.

My bit was two blogs and a Twitter feed. I expected the blogs to work best, because they contained The Whole Story, but it was Twitter that took off. (I subsequently did a standalone story on Twitter, setting up an account and tweeting in real time. This is the story ‘Veronika & Roger-Roger’ in Life-Like.)

What I learned —

If you’re going to collaborate, do it with people who are better than you are.

The next experiment took me one step closer to A Writer’s Diary. I serialised an unpublished novel, Lilian’s Spell Book, on Wattpad. The response from readers was wonderful. For several months it hung around the top of the Paranormal Fiction chart. It ended up with over 765,000 reads. A novel which had seemed dead-to-the-world was revived.

What I learned —

Readers can save a book’s life – and a writer’s, too.

Since then, I’ve serialised a couple more books online. First was Writing and Shit, which went out weekly on my blog. This is creative writing manual that started with failed work, abandoned stories, and tried to give some suggestions about how you could get out of the crap. All of this came from painful experience.

What I learned —

If it really hurt, you probably learned something from it, and online readers respond to pain.

The other standalone book was How to Tell a Story to Save the World. In this, five screenwriting manuals and a couple of films are anatomised. What effect does all this supercharged heroism have on the climate? How to Tell a Story was serialised on the Writers Rebel website, which I’ve been editing. A pdf of the whole thing can now be downloaded.

What I learned —

The more specific you are, the more useful you’re likely to be.

And —

Sometimes, if you want something out fast, you have to self-publish.

Which brings us to A Writer’s Diary, where I’ve tried to use everything I’ve learned.

Much of the advice you’ll have seen elsewhere applies to the most popular of the diary entries.

Those which advertise themselves in the Title tend to do best — On Giving Up Substack and On 9 Things You Need to Write a Novel are examples of this.

Some specific advice about Substack —

If what you write chimes with readers’ thoughts at that moment, your posts are likely to do much better. This means reacting to what’s happening in the news, or in publishing, but also having things in reserve you can bring out when appropriate.

It’s worth Restacking to share excerpts, though I was wary of annoying people with self-quotation. Restacks often travel further, and get more traction, than other social media.

Hardly anyone seems to come across to my Substack from Instagram, so I think I’m abandoning sharing to there. The inability to link out may explain this, but it’s also a place more about pictures than, say, bluesky — which is picking up okay. Twitter/X is not yet replaced, but will be.

Facebook is still the most reliable source of visitors. That may be due to my good friends there. What goes down best is asking the main question of your post. This gets a debate running that’s hooked on your subject.

That’s it.

Good luck with your own online writing.