Twitter writing competition – a story in 140 chars

I was alerted to a twitter writing competition over on copyblogger and decided to have a go. The rules are that the story must be exactly 140 characters in length, and it’s only one entry per person with a deadline this Friday so I composed an entry right away. I could have waited to get the measure of all the other entries coming in, but it’s better to be quick and impulsive sometimes.

Twitter is the simple web and mobile application that allows for an exchange of public and private messages of up to 140 characters in length, and it’s the simplicity and brevity which make for the charm of the environment. That and the fact that twitter was the first micro-blogging tool to achieve critical mass, so it’s where everybody else is. The only Social Objects are the “tweets” (posts) and “twits” (twitterers) themselves.

Writing styes on twitter can vary from ugly txt speak (not gr8 !) through cut down sentences ( “need coffee. late for bus” ) to Haiku poetry, free expression and eloquent mini sagas. As with blog reading, the value is in following developments over time – days, weeks and months.

Here’s my 140 character twitter story:

I feel my neighbours make far too much fuss about their precious lawns and flower borders. So stealthily from my side, I grow weeds at them.

But you can do better than that! Of course you can.

This is a very strong entry by Smithereensblog

We all expected nuclear war, epidemics, melted ice caps. But poisoning by plastic? A childless world? We had no contingency plan for that.

There are 263 comments on the blog post where the competition is now, most of them simply links to the twitter status updates as entries to the contest, and I’m not sure if the stories themselves will ever need to be gathered together on a wiki page for example, or if they can just be linked to in situ. It’s not very fluid to work your way through at present, and with nearly three full days to go, it can only get more unweildy. Following on the apparent usefulness of the ABblogpack drop.io I tried setting up a twitter story drop.io to allow for anybody to add their own links but that doesn’t seem to offer much more than the original list of blog comments really, so I didn’t proceed with it. Or should I?

Waiting in Transit: Twitter Writing Contest on Copyblogger

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The Golden Pencil : Write 140 Character Fiction for an IPod Nano

Noel Feria : Twitter Writing Contest: Win an iPod Nano For the Best 140 Character Story

The competition entry page again: twitter writing competition

twitter story drop.io