There’s really only one reason I twitter: words, words, words. I don’t have very many friends. I don’t even know most of the people (entities?) who follow me. But there’s something about getting online and being forced to condense a moment, a feeling, or an action into 140 characters for all your twitterverse to see. In these publishing times, when writers are usually asked to cut cut cut their words words words, twittering is a great daily exercise in concision. I don’t take my twittering lightly. Although I tweet daily, my tweets are few and far between. But I like to think they are meaningful, albeit brief prose.
I’m one of those writers who loves words on a page as much if not more than a good storyline. I love the sound of the voice in my head saying the words as I type–and re-type–then revise them. The spacing of properly employed ellipses excites me, and–dare I say it?–I feel a rush of adrenaline when the rare exclamation point leaps out from under my clicking fingers. There! Like that!
Whew. I better stop. (The news today reported that a 44-year-old man with high blood pressure died watching Avatar. He got too excited.)
I suppose most twitterers (twits) would make the claim that twitter is all about communication. Although I enjoy watching my twitter-feed, I derive most of my twitter-joy from when another writer, agent, or word-person strings together something especially thought-provoking or witty. Even though I don’t know them from Adam. I’ve experienced many an LOL moment from twitter. Conversely, I’ve un-followed careless, boring, mistake-prone twitter-hogs. That still makes it all about words, right? So I’m always tweaking who I follow as if it were a craft. Reading a good twitter-feed for a few minutes instead of surfing the internet for an interesting read is like drinking a double-espresso instead of a pot of coffee. If it’s the caffeine you’re after, that is.
And speaking of the internet, and words: I resisted starting this blog because there are so so many blogs out there, and I’ve always eschewed doing something just because everyone else is doing it. Sheep mentality, if you will. But some of them are really good. I just read a random blog before I started this post about a woman’s first Christmas without her mother. About how she imagined her own children feeling their first Christmas without her, perhaps thirty years down the road. About how after the holidays she threw out garbage sacks full of old cards and memorabilia, to save her children from having to do it when she died–or was she depriving them of precious memories?–she asked herself. This random blog that I stumbled across, this random post that my eyes just happened to light on, made me cry. I rarely even cry at sappy movies. So why did I cry just now? Words words words that just happened to strike the right chord with me at the right moment.
Sometimes words just get to you. That’s why I’m a writer, and that’s why I’m on twitter.
(Hello? Anybody out there? If words fall into a forest of unread blog posts, do they have any meaning? Someone please say yes!)
Excelsior.
