Twitterpated

So...a couple of my keener students want me to start "Twittering." If I hadn't known already what Twitter was, I would've been highly confused and/or offended at the suggestion. At this point, I'm on the fence. Input on this matter will be greatly appreciated.

I went to check Twitter out, and turns out it's essentially microblogging.

This is how it works, according to Twitter:

With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and
always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted. Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

Twitter answers the basic question: What are you doing? I'm not sure that's a very important question to answer on a daily basis. I'm not sure I want to be hyper connected to anyone, nor do I think I want them knowing what I'm doing constantly. I do not believe this is the "modern antidote" to information overload. On the contrary, I believe it is the latest addition to info overload--why would anyone care what I was doing in the next five minutes? How can this possibly be information worth knowing?

On the other hand...
........ I love blogging.

My updates may not reflect it, but I think about blogging all the time. But as you may have noticed, I'm not exactly good at short blogs. Anything journal-oriented usually turns into a long diatribe. Twitter is about pithy-ness. I'm not sure I can do pithy. But I like the concept of the microblog.

I love blogging because I love writing. I love teaching writing, I love figuring out the formula for a particular genre, I love reading other people's writing. I love watching writing develop. I'm probably one of the few people who loves student conferences. And I love my own writing. I like scholarly writing (when it's about stuff I'm interested in); I especially love my own creative writing. I am so looking forward to getting into May and getting back to my creative pieces and sending them out again. And as it turns out, there's two particular fiction genres that I love the most out of all writing.

It's called flash fiction and short short fiction.

Flash fiction or "short shorts" are extremely short stories. Flash is usually 1000 words or less. Short shorts (which sound like a clothing item from 1995) are between 1000 and 2500 words. What is recognized as a "short story" usually starts at 2500 words and goes up from there. I am most comfortable with short shorts and flash (a combination that sounds like doing something lewd in public in 1995). I wrote short shorts and flash before I knew they were credible genres. It's what I do best, and it's what I love to read. The point is to engage the imagination and to create impact--sort of like the way a pebble ripples a still pond. A good flash story makes the reader do the work--the reader creates scenes and imaginings that aren't textually there. Here's a good example from Papa Hemingway, and currently the shortest flash story I know of:

For Sale: Baby shoes; never worn

Very Twitter worthy. All the imaginings of how this happened or why are up to the reader. It's heavy with possible meaning. It's probably the JW in me, but we were also raised to see heavy meaning in the "flash fiction" of a Bible verse. Gad, you just can't ever get away from it.

So maybe I will, and maybe I won't Twitter. I don't know yet.

Maybe I'll consider it "flash blogging."

-- DV