Reading & Writing Reflection #10

Twitter Fiction

Once I settled on the idea of doing very short stories, my Twitter Fiction went quite well. Through reading some examples and making a list of what I enjoyed about them, I was able to get some inspiration as to what I wanted my Twitter Fiction to look like. Something that was rather frustrating was finding enough topics to talk about. I guess having complete artistic freedom was more stressful than expected. In the end, my favourite tweets ended up being those that were silly or had some sort of twist to them. I’m not usually proud of the things I write, but in this case there are some tweets that I would willingly share with people. I tend to use long, descriptive sentences whenever I write (sorry to those that have ever had a conversation with me through text messages,) so this assignment was a bit of a challenge to do the opposite. I learned that I really am capable of summing up my thoughts in a shorter way. In some cases, the use of a thesaurus helped a lot with this.

Publishing myself on Twitter made me a little uncomfortable at first. I have never used it before, therefore I was unfamiliar with how everything worked and felt strange about sharing my writing with others. It made me think twice about what I would and wouldn’t want the public to see, which really controlled what I tweeted. Once I understood the concept of Twitter, I had realised that I could really get creative and use it to my advantage. I found myself wanting to tweet things from my everyday life (as most people do,) follow things/people I’m interested in, and simply go outside of the box. My perspective of Twitter changed drastically over the course of the week. I originally thought that Twitter was just for joking around, posting stupid things, and making sure that people know exactly what kind of sandwich you’re eating at 12:34 on a Thursday and what it looked like before you consumed it. As great as those things are, I didn’t even think that Twitter could be used for intelligent things. There is so much extra information and things one could learn from the Twitter feeds of others that I never knew about (some cool contests too.) This was in fact surprising to me, and shows me the potential of Twitter/social media in general.

I read the Twitter Fiction of my classmates – mostly VSS as well as some extended stories. I think that the VSS interested me more because they were quick, entertaining, easy reads that often had twists or unexpected endings.  When it came to following an author from the Twitter festival, I chose @elliotholt. Elliot Holt’s writing really impressed me! She went as far as to make 3 extra Twitter accounts for each one of her characters, and retweeted their tweets in the correct order to form a story. She said that the process was rather tiring, and I can definitely see how that would be true. Her extra effort was appreciated, and I found the story to be quite captivating, which made me interested in finding out the verdict. Something that I really enjoyed is how Elliot Holt tried to get her readers involved. She had asked them whether the mysterious death was a suicide or homicide, and left the subject open to discussion.  This shows just another way writers today can use social media to share their talent and get the audience’s input while doing so. I really enjoyed using class time to read Twitter. It was a nice way to spice things up and keep me awake during the first period of the day. Sometimes I’m in a bit of a sleepy daze during reading periods, so it was a nice change.