Twitter as a Writer’s Companion
Most of you have heard of twitter by now. People either love it and get horribly addicted to it or shun it as a “social phenomenon” and avoid it entirely.
However, I’ve used it for several important tools:
- call and remind me to do something in X minutes, using timer (like stop writing and go to class)
- add things to my todo list, rtm, from my phone when I am traveling
- keeping status with developers so we know what everbody is working on all the time
And it’s the third idea that started churning the gears in my head. The LED’s were flashing like mad, and they had the binary version of this could help your writing all over them.
We’ve used various threads on Critique Circle to track writing goals and progress. We’ve encouraged one another via mail and messages. Which brings me to the point [finally]:
Every time an author posts their success, it inspires me to write harder.
Twitter is such a beautiful tool for this. You can set it up with launcy and do nothing more than hit alt+space and type:
wrote 500 words on LLS, yay!
And the world is instantly aware of your progress. One textbox, one option: write what you did. And all your friends are instantly aware. It’s a radical way to encourage each other and stay up to date on great friends with busy lives.
Here’s how you do it:
- Sign up on twitter (1 form, 3 fields, 30 seconds)
- Follow your friends, like Wulf
- Post your progress and inspirations and frustrations!
- Read about all your friends and get inpired™!
For those of you who want to try out something a little better than just a web browser, you can use twitter from your phone with SMS, via IM, through launchy, or from several desktop clients.