Nothing Novel About Twitter
There are more people out there writing novel-length prose. The problem is they are all doing it in blurbs of 140 characters. Look at your Twitter account right now. I double-dog dare you. (I'll wait...) Now look at the number right above the word "TWEETS". For some of you its in the tens of thousands. It is my opinion that it's OK for you to be proud of this number. It's a pretty significant accomplishment. I'm even a little proud of my 9,062. How many words is that? Well, if I count the number of words in my last 10 tweets (7, 24, 9, 2, 23, 23, 19, 8, 24, 21) and divide by 10 I get an even 16 words. That is 144,992 words in the last two or three years. That is one hefty tomb or two decent-sized novels. Now I'm fairly certain stringing those tweets together to form a book would at the very best be confusing and at the very worst be unreadable. But it does bring about some truths for us writers. We can write novels. Almost all of us....