Twitterheads, Twitterberrys, Twitter Thumbs, Twittledeedee, Twittledeedum…
Posted on | April 8, 2009 | Comments Off
by Sean Scott Maguire
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday is dedicated to blogging for money on www.BiscayneWriters.com.
I love to write, and I often ramble on and on and on, so, I’m totally getting into this twitter thing, and in my warped thinking, I thought I was some kind of guru of twitter, just because I had been tweeting for about a month longer than some tech-savvy writers I know. So I got high on my horse and started preaching from my iPhone soap box. I had forgotten that the great thing about twitter is that you can do what you want. You follow who you want, you post your tweets in any way you want, and everyone is happy. That’s basically why it’s so cool because there is no pressure to conform to any norms. You can conform if you want, but you don’t have to.
A critical writer friend told me, “I try not to tweet too much, because it seems a bit frivolous.â€Â To her credit, she tried to lighten the blow, by adding something like “but if twitter is helping you find your voice, that’s great.†(As you know if you follow me on twitter, I tweet a LOT, which can be annoying and cause some people to decide not to follow me. That’s fine with me, though, because I tweet for me, just to get my thoughts out there, and if people like it, they follow, and if not they don’t, and we are all happy. Or something like that. I’m also think I’m totally hilarious, which makes me not feel so bad about tweeting all the time. I’m still working out the kinks of my Twitter philosophy).
Anyway, the point is that this person was reminding me to “snap out of it and Chillaxxxxx, man,†which was good because it reminded me of the above reasons for tweeting in the first place. Still, upon further reflection, she must have thought she was being a bit harsh, because she quickly followed with this email:
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I hope I didn’t sound snobby in my reply to you…I thought about it afterwards and realized you may have read it that way. Arg. I was thinking afterwards that Twitter can be good for writing dialogue for a larger piece…so twitter away!
Of course, I couldn’t pass up a chance to respond with another long, rambling half-sensical email, so I responded (notice how I get on my Twittery high horse again):
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I suppose I could have taken it as being a bit snarky, and normally I would because I am the sensitive-I-wish-I-were-an-artist-but-I’m-not-so-I’ll-just-act-like-one type. But I didn’t take it in a bad way. In fact, I agree that it can be frivolous, especially if, as you said you are trying to do, you are trying focus your writing. For me, the main thing to remember about twitter is that it’s fun. People use it for all kinds of reasons.
I use it because I have random thoughts throughout the day, and I used to just have the thought, then not share it because I didn’t want people to think I was weird, and then repress the thought, and then get on with my day. The thing I am discovering about myself, when it comes to humor writing, is that the more I write, the more jokes I come up with. It’s kind of like magic, I have no idea why it works that way. On occasion, I even sit down to write because I figure I haven’t updated the blog for a while, but I have nothing to say. I start writing random shit just to put something on the screen, and, after slogging through the first paragraph, I start coming up with (what I consider to be) humorous little statements and themes and stuff. So for me, twitter actually focuses my writing by allowing me to spring all my free-form randomness on the world before it gets repressed by my don’t-let-them-think-you’re-weird voice.
Now, with twitter, I whip out my iPhone, type away, check to make sure the predictive typing didn’t mangle my tweet too badly, and send it off. The people that think my tweets are entertaining continue to follow me. The ones that don’t remove me from their follow list. No fuss no muss.
It’s gone a long way in bringing out my inner guy-who-sees-the-funny-side-of-things and has more or less banished the guy-who-is-scared-to-be-himself.
By the way, my wife sometimes gets annoyed, because inspiration strikes, and I’m like, “What’s that, you love me? Okay, let me finish this tweet and I’ll try to be romantic. How do you spell LOL?” But that’s a whole different story (now I have an idea for my next blog post. See how that works? It freaks me out, man!)
So, I tweet a lot because I like to, some people tweet hardly every, and others tweet only when they have something to sell. But it’s all cool because it’s a flexible platform.
Also, I noticed that I can drive traffic to my blog with twitter. I haven’t installed tools yet to my new website, but on my old one (editor’s note – we’re talking about www.aramus-genie.blogspot.com and you should check it out because it’s hilarious), before twitter I had about ten or twelve visitors to my blog. Now, when I update the blog, I get a bunch (between announcing it on twitter and facebook).
Sorry I wrote so much. Sometimes I go crazy, what can I say?
Did you see what I did at the end there? I tried to make it okay that I was getting all preachy, and writing way to much for a simple email, by inserting a little self deprecating humor. Kind of like the previous two sentences.
Anyway, with the following response, my critical friend spotted her chance to get me to stop writing all these emails to her when she’d rather be doing – I don’t know – anything else:
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O o o.
I love this dialogue.
Let’s submit it to BiscayneWriters.com. It will be more commentary on these technology tools that writers now have to develop our voices…what do you think?
I think that is another example of how this person is a genius. She encouraged my writing, got me off her back, and expounded on her ongoing theme of writing about technology tools that writers can use. Do you see the genius? Do you see it? I do, and I gotta go because I’m going to tweet about it right frakking now!
Follow Sean’s twitters…if you dare!
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