Twitterature... Twiction...

Curbside Message, Sacramento, CA

Have you heard of these terms before, because I hadn't until yesterday. Twitterature or twitter literature. Twiction/TwitFic or twitter fiction.

Is it possible to tell a story in 140 characters or less? 140 characters! That's not a word limit, it's a character limit which averages out to be about 12 words. The average English sentence is 16 words or 160 characters. How is a story told in 140 characters?

"How to Tweet Like a Pro in 140 Characters - Or Less" talks a bit about this. The author states that writing tweets actually makes people a better writer because "every sentence is a complete idea with a minimum of fluff and needless words."

There are several tricks to conserving characters when writing twitter literature or twitter fiction.

1. Use contractions freely. 
2. Try to avoid "and" "or" "but" as well as other conjunctions.
3. Drop pronouns, especially "that"
4. Stop using the "I" it makes the sentences more declarative. 
5. Use numbers, don't spell them out.
6. Don't double space between words.
7. Drop the very last period.
8. Use hashtag #twiction because it's shorter than #twitterature

Another tutorial for writing Twiction was found on this Teen Twiction website. Sometimes a twitter story is summed up in one tweet. For example, Ernest Hemingway once said that his best story was written in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Some authors connect tweets together to formulate their story. In this case, the story is more of a micro-fiction series.

So why am I talking about Twiction? Because I'm venturing into the twitterverse as @JennStories where I'll be attempting to write twiction. I figure like anything else, it's going to take practice and I might as well start now.