Some Lessons from Writing for the #TwitterFiction Festival.

569 tweets.

That’s how many tweets I’ll be popping out from eight Twitter accounts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week for the #TwitterFiction Festival.

From 6 – 7 PM AEST each day, I’ll be telling the story of Qan and The Mentor. I’ve been writing the story whilst on holiday without my trusty laptop, and it’s certainly been a challenging experience. Since some of you may consider writing fiction on Twitter in the future, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learnt from this experience.

1. Keep it simple. I’m using several accounts to tweet this story, since it includes flashbacks. This has produced a number of challenges for me, including making sure I have a profile picture for each character, as well as background information and motivations. Keep it simple – one or two accounts max!

2. Hashtags eat up your (text) characters. I’m using #TheLastLesson for my story – combined with #TwitterFiction I’m using up 29 of my precious 160 characters to get my hashtags on. Think about the length of your tags – make sure they’re unique and not too long. On reflection, I’d shorten mine a touch.

3. Get ready to be concise. I should have written my original tweets with a measure of how long they were. I had to edit around 1/4 of my tweets as I did my final edit because they were too long. The key is to be concise: I found the biggest challenge to be avoiding repitition in my tweets as I had only a 130 characters to work with.

Those are my original thoughts – I’m sure I’ll have more once my story goes live. Watch it unfold on my Twitter List or on my Twitter account in two days’ time!