Writing With Twitter: It Works For Me
This past week, I've been doing my writing sessions with Twitter, Seesmic Web, and the #amwriting hashtag. It's been working extremely well for me. (Although, I have to admit, the fact that I've been knocking down Scenes of DOOM like dominos lately might have influenced things.)
Sometimes I discover a new way of doing things online and it is shiny and exciting and I get extremely enthusiastic about it only to let it fall by the wayside a week later, so it's still early to tell with this arrangement.
But basically, it works like this:
Whenever I'm about to start writing for the day, I tweet "It's time for BUSINESS." Variations include TIME FOR BUSINESS, or IT IS TIME. It wasn't a conscious decision; it was just something that I fell into doing this past week. Best I can figure is that it's a word play off of "Let's get down to business." I could have easily said, "It's time for work!" but that has day-job connotations for me, so I can see why my brain would avoid that. I couldh ave also used "It's time for writing!" But I think that puts the writing task right smack in my face... and I've learned that I'm more successful when I sneak up on teh business of writing rather than head it straight on.
Anyway, I like it. It's a simple. It's easy. It works for me. It's not quite a writing ritual yet, but it definitely has the makings of one.
After that, it's just me, my opened documents and Seesmic Web.
Seesmic actually comes in three flavors: Seesmic for Desktop (using Adobe AIR), Seesmic for Windows (native), and Seesmic for Web. I use Web because I like the portability. I might not always be writing on the same machine, and I like to keep my online-related stuff, well, online. I was actually using Brizzly.com for Twitter before Seesmic, and if you don't want to have too many bells and whistles but just a little more ease with Twitter, I'd recommend it. Brizzly is like Twitter but just plain better. Seesmic, however, is like Twitter with the cool stuff.
My Seesmic Web account looks like this:
I put Home, Mentions, #amwriting, and #sporkers (not shown, but it's there in the space scrollable to the right) on my dashboard, and that pretty much serves most of my writing session purposes. Seesmic Web plays sound notifications and have little "new" indicators so I know when new tweets, mentions or direct messages come in, so I tell myself it's okay to ignore this window while I focus on my document. [If I'm not mistaken, there are different kinds of sound notifications, too, so if I use it enough, I should be able to distinguish between mentions/direct messages (highest priority) and just normal tweets.
I've never really understood the appeal of Twitter chats until I saw how Seesmic (and other Twitter clients--some that are geared specifically to facilitate chatting on Twitter) dealt with hashtags. And I discovered all this by poking into #amwriting which calls itself "a slow chat. You’re not expected to stay tuned-in constantly. The chat happens in the background of your writing day. It is a virtual watercooler for writers, a place you can hang out and talk to other writers about your current writing projects (and theirs) and then you get back to work. The energy of writers who post here is amazing."
It's like NaNo. Even if I don't talk to anyone on the #amwriting hashtag, just watching it update throughout my writing session is like being in a huge write-in session at a public place. You glance up, see all these writers hard at work, and then, maybe, some of that collective writing energy rubs off on you, too.
Sometimes I discover a new way of doing things online and it is shiny and exciting and I get extremely enthusiastic about it only to let it fall by the wayside a week later, so it's still early to tell with this arrangement.
But basically, it works like this:
Whenever I'm about to start writing for the day, I tweet "It's time for BUSINESS." Variations include TIME FOR BUSINESS, or IT IS TIME. It wasn't a conscious decision; it was just something that I fell into doing this past week. Best I can figure is that it's a word play off of "Let's get down to business." I could have easily said, "It's time for work!" but that has day-job connotations for me, so I can see why my brain would avoid that. I couldh ave also used "It's time for writing!" But I think that puts the writing task right smack in my face... and I've learned that I'm more successful when I sneak up on teh business of writing rather than head it straight on.
Anyway, I like it. It's a simple. It's easy. It works for me. It's not quite a writing ritual yet, but it definitely has the makings of one.
After that, it's just me, my opened documents and Seesmic Web.
Seesmic actually comes in three flavors: Seesmic for Desktop (using Adobe AIR), Seesmic for Windows (native), and Seesmic for Web. I use Web because I like the portability. I might not always be writing on the same machine, and I like to keep my online-related stuff, well, online. I was actually using Brizzly.com for Twitter before Seesmic, and if you don't want to have too many bells and whistles but just a little more ease with Twitter, I'd recommend it. Brizzly is like Twitter but just plain better. Seesmic, however, is like Twitter with the cool stuff.
My Seesmic Web account looks like this:
I put Home, Mentions, #amwriting, and #sporkers (not shown, but it's there in the space scrollable to the right) on my dashboard, and that pretty much serves most of my writing session purposes. Seesmic Web plays sound notifications and have little "new" indicators so I know when new tweets, mentions or direct messages come in, so I tell myself it's okay to ignore this window while I focus on my document. [If I'm not mistaken, there are different kinds of sound notifications, too, so if I use it enough, I should be able to distinguish between mentions/direct messages (highest priority) and just normal tweets.
I've never really understood the appeal of Twitter chats until I saw how Seesmic (and other Twitter clients--some that are geared specifically to facilitate chatting on Twitter) dealt with hashtags. And I discovered all this by poking into #amwriting which calls itself "a slow chat. You’re not expected to stay tuned-in constantly. The chat happens in the background of your writing day. It is a virtual watercooler for writers, a place you can hang out and talk to other writers about your current writing projects (and theirs) and then you get back to work. The energy of writers who post here is amazing."
It's like NaNo. Even if I don't talk to anyone on the #amwriting hashtag, just watching it update throughout my writing session is like being in a huge write-in session at a public place. You glance up, see all these writers hard at work, and then, maybe, some of that collective writing energy rubs off on you, too.