Suggest Tweeting to
some writers – or writers in their own minds – and they go all infra-dig snooty on you, like “Thou
shalt not Tweet” is some kind of Writer Religion Commandment, or something.
What a mistake. Tweeting can be a wonderful discipline. For me, a former
newspaper person, it’s like writing headlines. Having to squish the essence of
a 1,200-word story into three lines of 18 characters each focuses one’s
thinking very fast. Especially with some grizzly, cigar-chomping Ed Asner
look-alike editor growling over your shoulder. And that’s kind of like the old
saw: “Eat a live toad first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen
to you all day long.”
Being a ham radio operator (K4GLX) since age 13, hasn’t hurt either. As a
teenager, I spent long hours thinking fast and translating information into the
dots and dashes of Morse code, or CW, as we on the inside call it. Brevity, in
that mode, is always more than just “the soul of wit.” It is a necessity.
I loved it when I first read Stephen King’s now famous line from On Writing: “The road to hell is paved
with adverbs.” It’s also full of more such encomia praising needless verbosity.
We can all tighten up, me included.
So, Yikes! That’s almost 300 words up there. I better stop. But before I
do, if you’re interested in a great essay on this whole topic of good writing,
including Tweeting, by a master essayist, Thomas Beller, writing for The New
Yorker’s “Page-Turner” feature, Google it. He reminds us, after all, that it was Gertrude Stein who wrote, “There
is no there there,” one of what he calls ”the great proto-Tweets.”
Umm: You do Google, don’t you?
