Earlier this week, Cloud Atlas author, David Mitchell, took to Twitter to publish a story over a number of days, each part constrained to a tweet's 140-character limit. It struck me as an excellent use of a medium which is largely noise and advert bombardment nowadays. Could I do the same, I asked myself.
Several days on and I'm now sitting before a document containing 68 tweets, each one advancing my story that little bit more. While Mitchell has confined each part to within the tweet's character count, I have taken it one step further and made each tweet exactly 140 characters. I found this to be a great, sometimes maddening(!), challenge. I'm used to writing precisely and sparingly when I work on drabbles (stories precisely 100 words long). There, you have to make every word count, but here, you have to make every letter and every piece of punctuation count. If you miss the target by just one character, you have to rephrase, rewrite, rework, until it's spot on. It forces you to make every syllable and every word important. Makes you strip away the unnecessary and focus on what really drives a story forward. Furthermore, I tried to make every tweet self-contained and each day's worth of tweets self-contained, in the sense that the reader is constantly learning something new and is often left with a teasing cliffhanger.
I plan to send out the tweets in bursts of 7-14 once per day over the course of one week. At the end of each day, for those unable to follow on Twitter, I will post that day's tweets together on Facebook and on this blog.
I have just read through the story in its entirety and am really pleased with how it's turned out. I hope you will be too. The journey, Only Me, begins soon...
Several days on and I'm now sitting before a document containing 68 tweets, each one advancing my story that little bit more. While Mitchell has confined each part to within the tweet's character count, I have taken it one step further and made each tweet exactly 140 characters. I found this to be a great, sometimes maddening(!), challenge. I'm used to writing precisely and sparingly when I work on drabbles (stories precisely 100 words long). There, you have to make every word count, but here, you have to make every letter and every piece of punctuation count. If you miss the target by just one character, you have to rephrase, rewrite, rework, until it's spot on. It forces you to make every syllable and every word important. Makes you strip away the unnecessary and focus on what really drives a story forward. Furthermore, I tried to make every tweet self-contained and each day's worth of tweets self-contained, in the sense that the reader is constantly learning something new and is often left with a teasing cliffhanger.
I plan to send out the tweets in bursts of 7-14 once per day over the course of one week. At the end of each day, for those unable to follow on Twitter, I will post that day's tweets together on Facebook and on this blog.
I have just read through the story in its entirety and am really pleased with how it's turned out. I hope you will be too. The journey, Only Me, begins soon...
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