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One Tweet at a Time

A quick note from the desk of the Excuse Editor:

I'm making my way around the world of social networking. My Space was left to collect dust when I discovered Facebook (I'll be announcing the Excuse Editor Fan Page soon). I even discovered the Writer's Digest Community. But it's taken a while to talk myself into 'tweeting'. Still not totally conviced, I signed up anyway. I'm certainly not a singing songbird yet, but you can find my sporadic tweets at http://twitter.com/ExcuseEditor.

While navigating around the one and two liners, I came across a 'novel' idea.

Did you ever play this writing game?: Someone starts off a story with one or two sentences, and then each person in the room adds one sentence at a time. I vaguely remember enjoying this as a kid. I did this for some 5th graders when I was substitute teaching one day and they had a great time with it.

Well, I came across the Twitter account, http://twitter.com/Tweet2Novel. It seems like Jeffrey is trying to play the same kind of game, but in cyberspace and on a grander scale. He hopes to get 100,000 tweets in order to complete a whole novel (I think that 100,000 is a bit much, since 100,000 words is about a 400 page book, so 100,000 tweets could be War & Peace size, or more. But still a fun idea). I was a little nostalgic for the writing games of my youth, so I played along. You can see how the story is progressing at http://tweet2novelstory.blogspot.com/. Find out how to add your own 140 characters to this work in progress at his Twitter or his blog.

Leave a comment if you decide to join in on Tweet2Novel. Also, what other writing or word games did you like as a kid? Or even now? I still don't pass up Mad Libs on a road trip...

Tina
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  1. RenaDecember 14, 2009 at 9:36 AM

    great idea. I'll check it out. I started tweeting in the Spring, but so far am not in love with Twitter. It just seems like a lot of people talking about themselves. "Look what I did/think/found." Kind of boring. I prefer FB and blogging for the conversation.

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