Twitter. Tweet. It's fun to tweet, and, I suppose, be a twit...
Twitter limits "tweets"--little text entries one can send to others who chose to follow him or her--to 140 characters. Not 140 words. One hundred and forty characters. That's not a lot, in case you're wondering. Especially when Twitter considers a space to be a character.
There are probably several ways to use the limit as a writing exercise. I just started yesterday, playing around.
My self-imposed mission is to make each of my tweets exactly 140 characters. I want to convey the idea I'm trying to convey (vague and weak though it might be) in 140 characters. In this little game I'm playing, I have a couple of rules:
- No shorthand, as in "texts" via cellphone
- Punctuation counts and must be used
- Must convey an idea
- Can't use multiple tweets to gain extra characters
There's no penalty if I don't make it, other than I call myself names at the computer...which means I won't try a similar exercise on YouTube. I'm doing this as an exercise, not because I have a lot of fluff in my writing--I don't. In fact, it's tighter than a rubber band on brick. I'm doing this to make sure I keep it as tight as a rubber band on a brick.
If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you probably already know how. Just follow Misticuf. That's me.
2 comments:
Sounds like you want to try your hand at some "micro fiction."
You know, there is a site that publishes only "tweet/micro-fiction" stuff. 140 characters, nothing more.
It's a good exercise in "less is more" that sort of thing.
A site that publishes tweet/micro-fiction? Interesting...do they pay by the word? :-D
I'll leave the micro fiction to you. It's an area in which you have special talent. I prefer the long nearly languid stretch of a novel manuscript. I enjoyed playing with the 140 character limit on Twitter, but it didn't take long to get pretty good at it (in my own shy opinion.) I believe I'll go back to tweeting whatever strikes my fancy.
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