A Guide to Writing Fiction on Twitter

Twitter is a very popular social networking site. People use it for all sorts of things--micro-blogging, networking, promoting websites, instant messaging, and even marketing products. Why is it so popular? Because it's like text-messaging. It's quick, easy to do, and thus can become a habit very quickly. And it is really, really fun!

So what does twitter offer a fiction writer? What kind of tales can be told via this medium, and how does it differ from other forms of prose?

The first thing to realize is that Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. This is very, very important. You won't get long, sweeping sentences dripping with oodles of descriptive and evocative words. You want to be short, concise, and to the point in your language.

This is a blessing for some authors who are just getting started. When you have so little to work with, it forces you to pick and chose what to say. It forces you to move the action forward, and to make sure that every post has a point to it. Many beginning writers (and some seasoned ones) focus too much on carefully crafting loving passages of vocabulary pornography. A character limit forces a writer to pick and choose his words for maximum impact.

If you find yourself stuck in a part of your story, then you can find the time to put in that loving description while you try to find ways out of your writer's block. But, in general, you want to focus more on action and dialog. Twitter works best when you're telling a story that seems to be taking place in real time. Use present tense, and first person perspective. Twitter is built for that, so play to the strengths of the medium.

So, what kind of stories can you tell via Twitter? The obvious answer is that you can use Twitter to chat "in character", taking a persona and trying to think in the mind of that character. For examples of this sort of tale, there's Sergeant Schlock of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary and Stockington, the twitter of Jason Scott's cat. This isn't much different than other forms of freewriting, except that you get a chance to have an audience right away. You can try out all sorts of interesting and crazy character ideas this way.

Then there is the fun of writing a whole story via twitter. There are all sorts of ideas you can use: The adventurers of a pulp-action hero, the diary of a serial killer, the apocalypse log of a family trying to survive nuclear war, the journey of a thief runing through a cursed city, the personal log of a stranded space marine--if you can picture a story being told in real time line by line, chances are it can make a wonderful twitter tale.

However, these sorts of stories require you to think about several things:

1) It might be difficult to attact followers. If you are writing a continuous narrative, you aren't going to want to interrupt the flow with @ replies and ReTweets, so the "social netowrking" part doesn't factor in as much. You may want to start a separate "Out Of Character" account to do the normal twitter stuff.

2) You will need to keep a constant pace. Try to update your story at least once a week. This may be difficult if, like me, you tend to be a "Spur of the moment" writer. Too long without update, and you'll lose people's interests. This is good discipline practice.

3) There are those who may take your work too seriously, especially if you are writing a tale set in the real world. Be prepared to explain that no, you aren't really a serial killer or a crazed ex-marine or whatever your character is.

4) Every so often, it will be prudent to collect your work. This way you can show it off to people who haven't the time or the patience to troll through hundreds, perhaps thousands of updates. Posting the story in other venues will require that you arrange the story in order (Twitter updates are posted newest-first). It's a bit tedious to do this, but it can be well worth the effort. Post the results on your blog or a content site like Associated Content.

So those are my thoughts on writing a story via Twitter. If you think this would be an interesting venue to try, why not start a story of your own? A twiter account is free, and easy to set up.

Oh, and if you do start a story, why not Follow Me so I can read it and watch your progress?