Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Joy of Tweeting a Short Story

OK, I'm not the first person to have this idea, but I'm having a ball doing it. It's like one prolonged writing exercise. The constraints of Twitter force some creative solutions upon sentence structure. The need to maintain the story context, and to have every tweet be its own mini story, has forced me to rethink my writing style. It's taught me that I've been rather lazy about my sentences. I have not been creating and/or releasing tension on a granular level. I've been leaving that responsibility to the chapter. I see now that have to bring that function to each paragraph and every sentence.

On a more practical level, one of my dislikes of the Twitter fiction genre is the lack of physical context. For example; with most stories if the tweets got reordered you would have no idea how to reassemble them. To prevent this I created a simple code. I add the initials of the story title and the post number to the beginning of each tweet. So for this story, INCIDENTAL CONTACT, now at the 20th tweet, today's post starts with, “IC#20”. It takes up some characters, but I think it helps the reader.

To see what I'm talking about, take a look at my Titter feed. (http://twitter.com/thetomflanders)

If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies.

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