Writing and Reading Reflection # 10

           I think Twitter Fiction went really well for me. At first it was actually pretty difficult though. Even though any topic was open to write about...I found that it was hard to choose something to write a story about, that would make sense under 140 characters. Since I chose to write my tweets in very short story form, I felt as if all 30+ tweets had to be completely different...but as I kept writing, I found that I can still make them involve the same topics and make them...unrelated at the same time. It got easier to come up with tweets after that. In my opinion, one of my greatest successes for this assignment came from the tweets that were told through the first person perspective. I tried to make a lot of very personal tweets (to the character) so I thought the writing would be better if I told it exactly as they would write about an experience, thought, or story about their life. In the beginning, I found coming up with fictional tweets extremely frustrating and difficult. In over one week, I only had about 10 tweets...or less. I felt completely uninspired and I had no ideas at all. I thought the tweets I was making were really boring and it discouraged me from continuing. I was trying to make them long and literal. Everything had to be textbook perfect, as if they could be published in a book...and not a very interesting one. Then I started to re-read and look up some of the professional tweets and I found that a lot of them were short, choppy, and not very serious. I believe this influenced a lot of my tweets to come...which leads me to another one of my successes. As mentioned earlier, at first my tweets were long and so literal, none of them were told in the first person perspective and they were so...typical. There was a sappy love story, a serial killer contemplating his next kill, a bitter divorce...they were original stories and yet they all seemed done before. I tried to fill all 140 characters and I think they were almost too long. So, my success came from my tweets that were short and concise...a lot of the stories were told by their character personally. The tweets were quick and cut deep. As a writer, I learned that I apparently like to make a lot of dark and depressing stories. Also, stories that told the truth about life in hidden ways...I began to make tweets where they was no real story line to them, it was just writing about real life, involving a characters life. They were simple and basic, but I think these were my best tweets. As far as publishing my tweets on Twitter...I didn't mind it too much. I already have a personal Twitter account, so I found that it was pretty different. I don't mine people reading my stories, I just wish I had more favourites and retweets than I did! ...Obviously, this assignment was a challenge for me because I have great difficulty getting to the point through my writing...but I think I did a good job at it by the end, hopefully. 
           I read a memoir by Fathome Butterfly and tweets involving gravestone characters by Jennifer Wilson. I read the Fathome Butterfly one because one of my friends recommended it because they found it interesting. I didn't actually like it very much because I found like it was all over the place...and not very structured. Some were actually kind of cool though, especially the pictures she posted, but other than that I wasn't a huge fan. The tweets by Jennifer Wilson were a bit more interesting...but I think the description I read about made it sound better than it was. I thought each separate post she posted would be a story she made up about the person who's name was on the gravestone. However, this was not the case. The tweets were divided into sections and each section was devoted to a specific person. I found it sort of difficult spending Thursdays class reading these Twitter Fiction stories because the tweets by the authors were pretty inconsistent and dispersed, you really had to look for the story. Personal tweets by the author tweeting at someone or advertising their page were mixed in with the stories, so I found this very frustrating and discouraged my from reading further into the story. One thing that surprised me was how many people participate with Twitter Fiction. When I searched the fiction hashtags, there were lots of stories that came up by people and I didn't it was that big of a deal. Also, each writer had a different sort of writing style and they were all pretty unique, I even found this to be the case with our class members stories. I found this very surprising but I really liked reading them. For example, I enjoyed a lot of Sam Deckert's tweets because I found that they were similar to mine in style...and idea choices, so I thought they were pretty cool.
            I don't think this assignment necessarily changed my perspective on Twitter because I already used it before hand with my personal account and I really like it. That being said, this assignment did show me new things about the site that I didn't know existed (the fictional stories) and I thought those were really interesting to read about. I think our next Buried Life unit would be good to tweet about. Even using our twitter accounts to tweets questions about class projects or recommendations about books would be of good use...even tweeting out good things that you have read or watched that you want people to know about. People in our class could really benefit from recommendations from others.