"Hey, I think I'll start a new social media platform where people can post their thoughts and stuff." "What are you going to call it?" "Twitter." "Twitter? That'll never work! It's a goofy name."

 

It took me years to learn the ropes on Twitter, and most of those years I didn't tweet at all. Anyway, I've been tweeting a lot in the last 2-odd years (very odd years), give or take a suspension or two.  As a writer of short stories and novels, I have found that the character limit is a great way to hone one's craft not only because it forces you to be concise (I never was a fan of the Hemingway terseness anyway) but because as you are trying to fit your initially verbose thought into that limitation, like trying to cram a body into a small box without damaging the body too much (though sometimes you have to cut off a vital limb or appendage), it forces you to try many new ways of rewording the same thought.  Of course, if your tweeting habits are always casual, or sloppy, or nonchalantly short & sweet, the character limitation won't impinge that much on your writing; and sometimes a pithy thought strikes me like lightning -- but more often than not, I have some rather lengthy thing to say and feel the need to attend to the complexities I see in whatever it is I'm tweeting about, and so it's like a puzzle game, trying to figure out the best way to fit that complexity and its nuances into that unforgivingly square box of the 280-character limit.  Some tweeters amusingly try ways around this -- from the rather clunky cheat of the "1/2...2/2" method, where they basically tweet multiple tweets in a part 1, part 2, part 3, etc.; to the more artful workaround of typing out a 3,000 word statement elsewhere (on Word or whatever) then taking a screenshot of that and plopping it into their tweet; to redirecting readers to "my substack".  I confess to have done all three of these at various junctures.  It's how you Function at the Junction, Mr. Tibbs.   Another use I've developed at Twitter is to use it as a kind of notebook for myself, putting down thoughts in several tweets (they don't have to be in a row, they can be -- and are -- interspersed with tweets about other unrelated subjects) which I may want to revisit and expand upon later in another medium.  Thus recently I've been jotting down tweets ("jeeting"? "twotting"?) of impressions that come to mind as I am watching the 2018-19 series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, starring the likeable Jim Halpert from The Office -- i.e., John Krasinski -- as an ex-military, now intelligence analyst whose sharp talents get him embroiled in actual counter-terrorism missions.  I tentatively plan on watching both seasons (if I can continue to stomach the nauseatingly rich diet of politically correct treacle about Muslims they steep every episode in) and writing a review of it with an eye to how it whitewashes Islam.  I've written many of these pieces over the years about various TV shows and movies that deal with Islamic terrorism (or don't deal with it but should, like the British show Spooks also known as MI-5 which, as I put it back in 2009 on my erstwhile blog, The Hesperado:  "Every episode is about terrorists—but never a hint of Islamic terrorists. They strain and reach for every possible flavor of terrorist except Muslims.") After I write my review of Jack Ryan, I may collect all my reviews together into a substack.