Today, the sun rises on a glorious time here in the Bay Area, a holiday I like to call the first day of school. Today, I lose my unpaid interns to third and fourth grade and gain five hours a day of quiet work time. Gaudeamus igitur and laborare est orare.*
So here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately (and yes, the Latin does enter in). In addition to editing manuscripts and articles, I’ve been picking up odd jobs maintaining website content for others. The most recent of those jobs involves a social media management component, including Twitter.
How can Twitter be an effective social media marketing tool and a source of entertaining and thoughtful content? Well, as one example there’s this guy, who is promoting his book using Twitter, not in the usual way but by releasing a short story one tweet at a time: a free sample in serial form.
I’ve written before about how formal constraints can help a writer focus, so I’m approaching this Twitter thing the way I would take on the task of writing a sonnet: use the rules as scaffolding, not obstacles. A single Twitter resembles haiku, whereas an ongoing feed would be more like an epic poem, or like this (if you like Victorians—seriously, every stanza would fit), or this (for those who prefer the moderns). I may be approaching the task sort of like this.
Digress? Me? Anyway, that’s the challenge that will occupy my quiet hours this fall. Content generation is easy, but how to make it both promotion and poetry? Not obviously either, of course, but delayed reaction poetry, an afterimage that blossoms in the reader’s memory.
* “Let us rejoice” and “to work is to pray.” The organization that has hired me for the tweeting is spiritual in nature—told you there was a reason for the Latin.