Twitter Fiction

Purpose:

This week in my English class we were given the opportunity to gain experience about the different sides of social media. As a normal consumer, when I make a post on social media it is about my life in some way shape or form. However, this week we could either create advertisement posts for books or create fictional story posts. I decided to make Twitter fiction posts as I felt that it would be a fun activity that allows my creative juices to flow. I have always really enjoyed writing short stories based on vague prompts as they make the reader dig deeper into what is being said. 


Process: 

For this assignment I picked three prompts from the provided website and had to author stories that could be posted on X, formally known as Twitter. Which meant there was a strict character limit of 280, which includes commas and letters, making the task more difficult than what meet the eye. I picked the prompts “Describe an unphotographable moment” “Why did the woman wake up screaming in the apartment below” and “Describe election day from the point of view of a baby in a stroller.” The easiest prompt for me to come up with an idea had been the apartment story as I immediately thought about an animal escaping its cage where the hardest story had been that of the election. This is because I’ve never experienced the ceremonious events that come with elections, I’ve always been in school and never had it mentioned so I had to guess what could be seen from a baby’s point of view. When beginning the activity, you don’t realize how difficult it will be to write a cohesive story in only a few words. I had to shorten my stories sometimes up to 7 times before it finally worked for the character limit X has. After doing this activity I can understand why others would write stories like this. Doing this really challenges you to make a story that still makes sense but with the least amount of words possible. Then readers are able to read the story and be left with pondering thoughts as some are quite vague like my first story.


Reflection: 

I feel as though the stories that I formulated are fun and I would be willing to read longer forms of them, specifically my first prompt about an unphotographable moment. How I left the story leaves the reader wondering what happened to the girl, why is the speaker wishing this moment could be on camera so badly, what is the relationship between the speaker and girl. All of which are questions that excite me, prompting me to want and write more to the story. Writing stories as if they would be viewed by the public is not as bad to me due to viewing all my writing for school as if many will see it. As we focus on public vs private writing in class, I find it hard to differentiate, this is because private in this context is supposed to be between me and the professor, but I already view that as public. Therefore, writing these stories with the interface they would go on in mind, never shifted my train of thought because I view all the text I submit as if many could see it. The experience of writing faux tweets taught me about the character limits that X, formally known as Twitter, has. I never post anything on X as it isn’t the social media platform that appeals to me most, so this experience made me think more about the differences between X, which I don’t use, and Instagram, which I do. Writing short sentences about my life is not my go to, but posting short stories is definitely more up my alley meaning I may write more stories that have the character limit moving forward, even if I don’t publish them. 


Prompts:

Prompt 1: Describe an unphotographable moment.


Prompt 2: Why did the woman wake up screaming in the apartment below?


Prompt 3: Describe election day from the point of view of a baby in a stroller.


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