Anyone Up For A Twitter Chain Story?
Posted on | June 12, 2009 at 5:45 pm | 7 Comments
I think it’s about time we started using Twitter in more original ways. My high school buddies and I used to get together with a typewriter and drink beer and pound out a story, each person writing a paragraph or so and leaving the protagonist in an awkward position for the next writer. (This is also known as a “round robin” story.) Eventually, the story would devolve into inanity, but it’s fun to see what other people do with your lead-ins. Some of you may remember we had a “chain song” contest on the Reign of Frogs website many years ago. I think those pages are gone now. We got a set of lyrics from our loyal fans but never ended up actually recording a song with them.
Anyway, I’m thinking the rules of the Twitter Chain Story will be something like this: I compile a list of people who are interested. I’ll write the first tweet of course, which will be the opening line(s) of the story. Then we’ll go down the list in order and the next person has to take up where the previous one left off. You must submit your tweet using your own Twitter account. When you have submitted your tweet, please ping the next person in the list (which will be maintained somewhere on this site), via a direct message or separate tweet or whatever. In order to convey as much story info as possible in a single tweet, there should be no @replies or anything else cluttering up the tweet aside from some common hash tag I’ll decide on to identify the tweet as part of the story, and possibly a sequence number for sorting out the order. Suggestions on the format would be appreciated. When we get to the end of the list, we start all over again at the top. I’m thinking that if it’s your turn and you don’t submit your entry within 24 hours, then you lose your spot in that cycle and it goes to the next person in the list. Maybe we should jumble up the list occasionally so that you’re not always following the same person. The story will end when a majority of the people involved deem it necessary. I’m unsure if we should let additional people join after the story has started. All Twitter rules and terms of service must be followed. Let’s try to keep it relatively clean.
Does that make sense? Anything I’ve missed? If you’d like to participate, or have any better ideas of how this might work, please submit a comment to this post. Be sure to include your Twitter username if you wish to participate. (Obviously you must have a Twitter account.) Please also include your real e-mail address in the specified box. It will not be published and no one but me will see it, and I won’t give it to anyone else or spam you. It will just be used for me to send out administration info about the project or to prod you if it’s your turn and you’re slacking.
Latre.
Comments
7 Responses to “Anyone Up For A Twitter Chain Story?”
June 12th, 2009 @ 7:29 pm
@dmr1965 is in. Have to ponder the format and such. Brain is done for today.
June 13th, 2009 @ 1:24 pm
Actually, many of those chain stories were so long ago we were writing them with Pepsis rather than beers.
Count me in for the chain twitter (chitter?)
June 13th, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
I was worried – if nobody else responded it was going to be a really short story. Twitter-Haiku? Twitter-Limericks?
June 14th, 2009 @ 12:00 am
I’ve no free time, but
maybe I can squeeze in a
quick Twitter haiku?
June 14th, 2009 @ 6:19 am
I am intrigued by this concept, but I don’t know that I could handle more than 1 tweet/day. How fast would you want it to run?
June 14th, 2009 @ 8:43 am
I am intrigued by this concept, but I don’t know that I could handle more than 1 tweet/day. How fast would you want it to run?
Good question. I don’t intend for it to be an all-consuming thing either, but I can see how it could get out of hand if there’s a lot of fast responses. We might need some slowing mechanism, like maybe the person at the top of the list (me) could wait to send my tweet until some length of time has passed since my last one (like 24 hours). Or we could just limit everyone to one tweet per day. Of course then we’d have to extend the “must submit within 24 hours rule” to 48 hours or something.
June 14th, 2009 @ 11:55 am
I think one tweet per day works if the deadline is 24 hours from when it becomes your turn to post.