#MWE: How An Online Writing Exercise Can Make Twitter Less Awful This Month
If you happen to follow a fair amount of music lovers or journalists on Twitter, you might have seen the vague hashtag #MWE on your timeline. That’s my fault.
To clear up any confusion you might have, the premise behind #MWE, social media shorthand for Music Writer Exercise, is pretty straightforward. For each of the twenty-eight days in February, participants select an album they’ve never heard before, listen to it start-to-finish, and write one tweet about the record. It’s precisely the sort of activity that works well on a text-based platform like Twitter. I should know, seeing as I came up with #MWE four years ago and have been more or less chaperoning this annual virtual writers’ workshop there ever since.
#MWE started out selfishly with the best of intentions. Online, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for being curmudgeonly, to put it mildly. As most people who spend any amount of time on Twitter can attest, the platform can really bring out the worst of you, its constant stream of provocations, triggers, and outrages prompting uncivil responses in return. Even back in 2015, well before aggressive Trump bots and alt-right scumbags made the place downright toxic, it wasn’t particularly healthy to spend too much time there. People who know me in real life, those poor bastards, would express that they didn’t quite love how I comported myself online.
Still, as a freelance music writer, I had too much incentive to be active on social media in spite of it very clearly turning me into kind of a jerk. The potential networking opportunities with other writers and commissioning editors on Twitter made it a proving ground for critical ideas, where pithy comments about LCD Soundsystem or Radiohead could lead to paying work for any number of content-craving outlets. Even as the writing gigs mounted, I could see what prolonged use of the app was doing to me, exacerbating some of my more disagreeable and obsessive tendencies.
Obligated to the platform for professional reasons, I knew I needed to find some way to make Twitter a less personally destructive force in my life. Positivity can frequently prove elusive for a critic, especially in an online environment, but it was with that very constructive spirit in mind that #MWE stemmed from. I often found myself grousing about the quality of music writing, subtweeting or explicitly snarking about one piece or another. It took awhile, but it eventually dawned on me that, no matter how much I complained, simply bellyaching over it didn’t make anything better.
Having participated in creative writing retreats and seminars since my teens, I began wondering if I could lead one myself on Twitter. I kept the scale reasonable yet ambitious enough, a deceptively simple one-tweet-per-album-per-day model. While I certainly don’t claim to have invented the practice of tweeting album reviews, I liked the idea of exploiting the app’s then-140 character count to ensure restraint, mirroring the word counts that professional critic’s regularly contend with. Though my Roman Catholic upbringing instilled in me a biblically Lenten sense of guilt-enabled sacrifice, choosing the shortest month of the year for #MWE made it marginally less of a commitment. In recognition of it coinciding with Black History Month, I encouraged people to include albums from Black musicians in their selections, emphasizing the works of women of color in particular.
For four years running now, I’ve found myself energetically liking and retweeting my fellow participants’ tweet-length album reviews, earnestly doling out feedback and encouragement throughout each of the twenty-eight days. Regardless of whether or not I agreed with their takes or the quality of the work, I felt an unexpectedly empathetic community with those who’d opted into this idea of mine. Of course, I’d conveyed no explicit obligation for the reviews to be positive, and naturally negative ones appeared.
Connected by a three-word hashtag, people appeared to be deriving joy from the exercise, having fun online. Though initially my intended audience had been other music critics of varying degrees of talent or experience, the inclusivity of #MWE became immediately apparent. Not unlike November’s NaNoWriMo, people who’d never considered themselves music writers wanted in. Accordingly, the community welcomed and motivated them, offering album suggestions and conversational feedback.
Listening actively to a piece of music for the first time is a legitimately exciting and universal experience. Many of us have vivid memories of our introductions to certain records at pivotal points in our lives. We created emotional connections out of these sessions, inextricably tethering them to our respective tastes in profound and lasting ways. And while the marathon-esque pace of #MWE may sometimes feel a bit more like speed dating than romance, the chances of discovering a new favorite or two in the bunch is worth the effort.
At a time when being on Twitter feels like a chore or even punishment, letting one’s love of music dominate the feed one month out of the year makes it a better place. It may even make you a better writer, or perhaps a better person. Whether it’s your first time or your fourth, I hope you’ll join us this month.
