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Hone Your Writing With Twitter Fiction
Why writing microfiction will make you a better writer
Several years ago I decided to write at least one story in a single tweet per day. The maximum length of a tweet now is 240, but at the time it was half that. I set about trying to craft microscopic fiction of exactly 140 characters. No more, no less.
Why should you try writing micro-fiction?
Limits
Everyone who writes has constraints. If you’re writing a novel, you need to abide by the acceptable wordcount range of your genre. If you’re writing an essay for school or an article in a newspaper, there are limits there too. Some limits are hard, some soft, but we all have constraints of some kind upon our writing. Training yourself with hard limits is a useful exercise.
Brevity
Micro-fiction is a great exercise in brevity. Trim the fat, every word must count. It forces you to remove filler words and figures of speech that bog down and bloat your writing. It also forces you to get to the point as quickly as possible and structure your story like a joke, with a setup and punchline. There’s no room for a B-story. Make it snappy.
