About

Novelists Writing vs. My Actual Childhood refers to a snowclone which grew popular on Twitter in which people of various ethnicities post a parody of the way a novelist would write about their background vs. the experiences they had growing up, highlighting the humorous ordinariness of their own lives.

Origin

On January 27th, 2020, Twitter user @WenzlerPowers^[1] posted a parody comparing the way a novelist would write about the American south vs. their lived experience, gaining over 5,000 retweets and 64,000 likes (shown below).

Precursor

Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt was published on January 21st, 2020. American Dirt, tells the tale of a Mexican family attempting to cross the border to America to escape a drug cartel. Though the book was released with a large amount of hype, it drew criticism from reviewers who felt that Cummins, a white woman, did a poor job representing Latino culture. This was parodied in the Writing My Latino Novel snowclone on Twitter, which imagined a white person writing an inauthentic novel about Latino culture by littering the work with clichés about Latino people.

Spread

After the WenzlerPowers tweet, other users added their own spin to his format. For example, user @sjaejones^[2] posted a tweet that gained over 410 retweets and 4,600 likes (shown below, left). User @zlikeinzorro^[3] posted an example that gained over 430 retweets and 4,300 likes (shown below, right). The trend was covered by Twitter Events.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References