November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but I’m way too busy to participate this year. (See “my wrap-up post from 2005”:www.manton.org/2005/12/5… for the last time I did it.) I would love to write something, though. Maybe I should consider “Ficlets”:ficlets.com or a similar site, but I’ve had Twitter on the brain lately. Why not take the embracing constraints approach and write a story through Twitter?
Introducing “Story 140”:www.story140.com/, a new web site and “Twitter account”:twitter.com/story140 where I will be writing a short story in 140 characters a day for 140 days. To make things interesting I set a few rules for myself (listed on the site), including that every tweet must be written the day it is posted and be reasonably grammatically correct while still exactly 140 characters. (I say “reasonably” because there will be the occasional use of incomplete sentences, and some people may question my spelling of dialog without the ending “ue”. That must be influenced by years of programming the old Mac toolbox.)
Even though it is extremely serialized, my hope is that the resulting story will actually be readable. We’ll have to see how successful I end up being at that goal. It’s already more challenging than I expected; the first tweet took me about 10 minutes to write, and the second one even longer.
