The Short Story

Procrastination, yes. But in a good way. Since my dissertation is all about the Twitter, it seemed relevant to take a moment to accept copyblogger‘s challenge to write a story in a 140-character tweet.

“The Hollow Moment” (an entry in the Twitter Writing Contest)

This isn’t the first time Twitter and writers have come together. The size constraint has been both incentive and inspiration to compose short, efficient messages on that channel from Day One. Journalists have begun to embrace the medium as a source of information as well as a backchannel for discussing the process of reporting a story. Writers also used Twitter effectively as a way to disseminate news about their winter strike. Recently, someone offered prizes for the best six-word tweet, a la Ernest Hemingway’s “For Sale: Baby shoes, never used.”

Back in December, some writers organized a collaborative story project, Twittories. 140 Twitter authors signed up on a wiki to take one line in the work-in-progress, passing it along to the next person. The effort never completed, as far as I can tell, but a record of the work (“The Darkness Inside“) remains with 86 authors contributing. Plans for a second project died in January with 110 people signed up for the twequel.

There is still time to enter Twitter Writing Contest. Compose your 140-character novelette-ette, and then post the link on the copyblogger site as a comment by 5p Central on Friday, May 23.

If only my dissertation could be written in Twitter.