Will Tweeting over-constrain or improve your writing?

Concise Writing in Random Tweetable thoughts

Will Twitter help your writing? By that I mean the act of writing, the craft, as opposed to the ability to promote your writing through a stream of hashtags, links, faves and re-tweets. Will expressing yourself 140 characters at a time over-constrain your ability to convey your thoughts, will it stifle your vision? Or will the skill to form concise little pearls of consciousness help you communicate your ideas in ways that sparkle and distill your thoughts without the encumbrance of unnecessary words?

I struggle with this question. Heck, I can’t write a story that matters in less than five thousand words, and I struggle at that as it is. I think words need not multiply needlessly, but they also need their space, and the ideas and images they portray need sufficient words and combinations thereof to take flight.

Still, over the past few months, while experimenting with the art of Tweeting, I’ve concocted my own set of nuggets which I won’t presume to call pearls. If nothing else, I’ve learned how to devise a short, less than elevator pitch length book blurb, and that alone is a nice tool to add to any writer’s toolkit.

Below I share some of my Tweets. I hope they don’t come across sounding like a bunch of electronic fortune cookies, and I’ll let you decide whether any of them are worth even the 140 character space they occupy.

Check out my published stories, novels and novellas at the Kindle store or Smashwords.

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