Sunday, April 17, 2011

Writing a Novel in Guess How Many Characters at a Time

So I got a Twitter account of a school project a few months ago. The project was, and still is, to write a novel on Twitter, or at least the start of one, up to the end of the year. The idea was one post a day, I believe. I'm @LordSazz for all those with the kind of necessarily morbid curiosity to pursue it.

So my English teacher is a madwoman. Will prose be broken forever? Will I forever be doomed to write in sentences usually no longer than 100 characters long (shoving two in there is usually desirable)? Is it going to be clean, nicely thought out and well written? I doubt any of these questions are to be answered in the affirmative, for one certainly because I have no hope of breaking all prose forever. Other assignments, Facebook, and very occasionally this holy place allow me to indulge my appetite for hilariously long sentences and their completely unnecessary words, but on the third point... I've written this beginning 140 characters at a time and a couple of times deleted a recent post and rewritten for errors. If it ends up a fine work of literature then that's just crazy.

But our teacher was inspired by this idea, so maybe some of us will make bajillions or something.