140

it struck me today most things i want to say don't need more than 140 characters. if blogger had a smaller window, my posts would be shorter. and that's why i guess i took to twitter.
so it has a silly name, but it isn't silly. it's this simple (not simplistic) way of telling your stories as they happen. of building the narrative of your life.
i've always been a fan of 'short' literature
haiku, flash fiction, six-word stories
never read lydia davis but interviews tell me i'll like her
and twitter is just this na. a whole mood/story communicated all concise, concentrated and combined with that other wonderful thing--immediacy.
@MelvinBurgess, @robinsloan, @AVARY, @rands do this so nicely.

tweetcloud is wordle for twitter. it said...

my top 3 words tweeted this year: book, love, story


so funny, those are also my three favorite words ever.

and this kind of aggregation makes sense on twitter because it's such few words. if you aggregate a blog or a book, the little words you get don't really add up to the whole, do they? longer pieces of writing need manymany words that on their own don't necessarily represent the whole piece. but short literature isn't the piece, it's only the representation. how awesome! so maybe a writer/artist/etc's twitter feed (or suchlike) tells you more about him/what goes through his head than his books. maybe it's a magical thing that lets us build our stories, narrate our legacies, track who we are at any given time. and if moments are like words, maybe who we are is best expressed as a sum total of the smaller fragments rather than a single, emphatic, defining point in time. maybe twitter is this fun mirror that exaggerates only the important parts (good and bad). and maybe, maybe we should learn to see each other like that as well.

so the point, within 140 characters, is this. stories matter. and anything that lets you tell yours is important. no matter how silly its name.