Why I Tweet

I was reading Hannah Nicklin's (@hannahnicklin) tweets as @TWPGoSee where she dared to share some of the things that people have said about her play writing, including things like this and this.

That made me think of this post by another Twitterer Wil Wheaton (@wilw). Especially the speech attributed to Patrick Stewart.

And this poem:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night".

In Richard Bolles book "What colour is your parachute?" he says that one way to get a handle on what kind of job you should be doing is to ask yourself what sorts of thing you do that you find totally engrossing. What kinds of thing make you lose all track of time? This is of course very close to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous definition of happiness in his book "Flow". For me, one of the answers is the following process:

My Losing all Track of Time List

• Write a blog post (using http://www.blogger.com)


• Compress a link to my blog post using (http://bit.ly)


• Publicise it by posting the shortened link on (http://www.twitter.com)


• Follow the number of clicks on the link on the bit.ly dashboard


• See if anybody has responded to my post with an @message on Twitter (or even on Facebook)


• Watch out for RT's (re-tweets) on Twitter. RT's are like manna from heaven.


• Follow up the next day with http://www.google.com/analytics/

Why are RT's so important to me? All my life I've wanted to be a writer, since going through the Adrian Mole phase of wanting to be a poet age 13. And what is a writer but someone who puts down their view of the world. And what is a successful writer? Someone who puts down their view of the world and manages somehow to get that view out to an audience and get a response.

In the old, pre-internet world, only a very few people got published. So that meant that if you were going to get published you had to either be very well-connected (like Mrs Beeton - knew next to nothing about cooking but was married to a publisher) or very very good.

I'm (or at least was) very unconnected. There are a lot of writers from very similar backgrounds to mine (like Ted Hughes, Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison) but they only seem to make it out of that background by being very, very, good and very clever. So growing up I thought that my only chance of ever being a writer was to be very, very good. And every now and then I would decide I was going to write something and lo and behold, it wasn't very good. I never showed it to anybody so, as Dylan Thomas said, my words "forked no lightning".

But that is the thing that is so marvellous about the "Losing all Track of Time List" combination of actions and websites. I can write something and get some kind of response. I can fork some tiny little splinters of lightning.

A few things have got near this "RT feeling" before. When I worked as a research slave lackey punchbag assistant at several universities, the feeling of getting publications and journals accepted came close. But there were some problems with the way feedback was given in academia.

Actually a lot of the feedback you get in academia is very similar to the kind that Hannah Nicklin got.

Before blogging was invented I started writing a weekly "funny" column here. Not sure why I gave this up (you'll be saddened to know it wasn't because I realised I'm not funny) but it was probably due to lack of feedback, a very few people were visiting my site, maybe half a dozen a month. Using the Blog/twitter/bit.ly method, I can see that between 6-12 people have at least clicked on any article I post. If it gets RT'd, that can scale the heady heights of maybe 20 or 30 clicks.

Those little sparks of lightning that my words have forked keep me going.