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I've been endeavouring to do quite a bit more writing recently, and like any aspiring author or poet, one of the biggest problems is inspiration. To attempt to solve that problem, I've found help from a site that I am on far too much - Twitter.

One of the things I both love and hate about Twitter is that it forces you to be concise. In an email, blog post, or similar message, you can rattle on about anything in as many damn characters as you like. But Twitter's 140-character limit forces you to get your point across succinctly and explicitly. How is that good for a writer? Well, the shortest stories are often the best. I've been quite addicted to @twitterfiction recently, and I love the stories on there. Whether you're like me when it comes to a short attention span or not, it can be a lot more interesting to read short, well-written stories or poetry than to read a novel.

Twitter is sporadic, instantaneous, and provides a real insight into people's minds. Many people tweet in a "stream of consciousness" style, just typing whatever comes to their heads. And as annoying as that can be for some, it's an amazing tool for inspiration. Apart from just reading your Twitter feed or the public feed, there are many tools that bring that data to life. Twittervision is one of them - you can have it as a flat map or as a 3D globe, showing you tweets from all around the world. But by far my favourite is called twistori. It grabs tweets from the Twitter public feed that have either the words "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel", or "I wish", and shows you results for whichever phrase you pick. It's a very simple yet captivating way to see how the public feels.

So next time that you have writers' block (and it happens a lot, at least for me, anyway), take a look at Twitter. Take a random post from somewhere, completely out of context. You don't know the story behind it, nor do you know how the tweet's author is feeling. But that doesn't matter. As a writer, it's your job to make that up.

Happy writing/Twittering!

Tim

Cross-posted here.