Technology and Writing: Twitter – part 1
Last month I began a discussion on writing and technology, and ways to use technology for writing purposes beyond simple self promotion. First, I’d like to tackle Twitter.
For the most part, I’m annoyed by people’s uses of Twitter, posting the inane details of their lives from random thoughts about life to buying peanut butter at the grocery store. These tweets could be a result of the most common piece of advice I’ve read about using Twitter: post at least once a day, and people not developing a good reason to be on Twitter. And unless someone has a very intriguing motive for posting daily messages, I’m not about to “follow” him/her.
Keeping those things in mind: posting at least once a day and having a clear writing purpose for tweeting, I asked a friend about different ways Twitter could be used. At one point, he suggested composing a novel via tweets. The 140-character limit would force me to be concise and posting at least once a day would keep me working on and thinking about the story. Though, I wasn’t sold on the idea from a “followers” point of view. It’d be difficult to keep track of a story read through sporadic tweets, and I’m not sure how fluid the writing would be with the limitations of Twitter. I like long, flowing sentences.
At the time I was contemplating signing up for Twitter, I was also dating a girl who lived some distance from me. Our unique way of keeping in touch was texting each other cinquains to say what we were doing and to share some of our intimate thoughts in verse. Yeah, too cute, I know. But since I was in the habit of writing a few cinquains throughout the week, I figured that I could manage a poem a day. Cinquains are fairly short and would work well with Twitter’s character limitations. Plus, there would be no continuity issues for “followers” as there would be with a novel. And Daily Cinquain was born.
In May, I’ll talk more about how my Twitter writing project has worked.
May 1st, 2010 at 3:49 am
[...] post a few poems from my Daily Cinquain Twitter feed that I’ve been discussing in my “Technology and Writing” [...]