Twitter for Writers

Since the realms of journalism and fiction-writing don’t seem to intersect as often as they should, you may have missed an interesting post this week that asks the question Can Twitter Make You a Better Editor?

We all know that Twitter is a great social media tool, connecting writers with readers and with the publishing community as a whole. But journalist Erin Everhart (@erinever in the Twitterverse) suggests that Twitter can help us actually improve our self-editing. I strongly recommend clicking over and reading her post if you haven’t.

Not only does Twitter force you to condense your thoughts into 140-character chunks, but it makes you narrow your posts down even further than that if you want them to be re-Tweeted without further editing. That means pruning your words down as far as possible, and then a little bit more.

Twitterers tend to go one of two ways: they drift into abbreviations and “text-speak” to fit their words in, or they focus on concision and economy of words and meaning.

I think there’s a blend of both that’s inevitable, but I’d say most people tend naturally toward one or the other. For writers, editors, and others in the publishing field, it’s (thankfully) the latter.

If you tend toward a lot of txt-speak in your tweets, but you want to be taken seriously as a writer, I suggest you get out of that habit. (u kno who u r.)

Since this blog is about strengthening writing, I want to suggest taking it a step further: make use Twitter’s limitations in a deliberate way, and take that 140-character limitation as a challenge. Practice expressing a lot in a single message without resorting to txt-ish shortcuts. Try condensing the plot of a classic of film or literature into a single tweet.

Can you express your story’s elevator pitch in 140 characters? In the process, you’ll be keying in on the heart of its most central conflict, possibly in a more surgical, precise way than you have before. You might learn something new about your story in the process, or just discover a more eyecatching way to express it. That’s something you can use no matter where you are in the writing process: when you’re rewriting your next draft, or when you’re crafting a compelling pitch for your query. And the need for that precision doesn’t stop when your book is published — that’s when it starts. Then you’ll need that concise summary for your marketing material, for interviews and appearances and family gatherings, and any time someone asks, “So, what’s your book about?”

To take it further, there’s a growing trend of fiction in 140: complete micro-mini short stories no longer than a single tweet. For some examples, see:

@arjunbasu
@astoryin140
@midnightstories
@microprose
@motkedapp
@tweetthemeat
@twitterfiction
@veryshortstory

How’s this for incentive? There are even some paying markets where you can submit your own microfiction. See:

@nanoism
@thaumatrope

Thinking in fewer characters can train you to make every word matter in your writing, but that Twitter can be an even better training tool if you’re aware of it and make use of it as one.

Tagged as: fiction, twitter, writing