For a little over a month now, I’ve been toying with Twitter. Not familiar with the term? Well, Twitter is an Internet service that allows users to keep in contact with others. In a sense, it’s a mini-blog. Users chose whom they want to follow and their friends, family, coworkers may chose to follow them. For example, Michael Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers. The “tweets” about what he is doing at work and at home (for example, I know the air condition is down at the Thomas Nelson building). I follow other writers, speakers, and the like.
Now here’s the kicker. Twitter only allows a post of 140 characters or less at a time. You have to get your idea across within those limits. 140 characters isn’t much but it amazes me to see how much can be said in such a limited space.
Over the years, I’ve observed that human’s like to press the envelope of restriction. Tell people they have only 140 keystrokes to make a statement and someone will step up to prove they can do more than imagined. Enter Matthew Richtel New York Times reporter and novelist. Matt has decided to write a story using Twitter. That means the story goes out to his followers crammed into 140 character bite-sized segments. It’s like reading two lines of a novel at a time.
Dumb idea. Just plain stupid. Can’t be done. Breaks all the rules. No one will care. So why do I look forward to every installment? He got my attention with the outlandish idea and locked it away with an intriguing mystery.
What kind of story is it? When I learned what he was doing, I went to his Twitter page and read his backlog entries. At first everything looks normal: posts about interviews and newspaper stuff, then the posts get weird. On June 9th everything changed with this post:
“It should not be snowing. Not now. In June. It's beautiful here. An outer contrast to such internal fear.”
It appears someone “stole” Richtel’s text-messaging cell phone and has been using it to post to Twitter. Each segment of the story is a Twitter post. This is an idea well worth stealing.
One of my great interests in life is creativity. I love reading about those who have a truly unique idea and does something with it. Richtel has done just that. One moment you’re rooting the character on; the next you start believing the guy is an evil man. Which is he?
As writers we often have to work within the guidelines given us. It’s part of the business, but it doesn’t mean we surrender our creativity. Matt Richtel has proven that point.
Alton Gansky
Comments