It’s nearly a month now since I started the #TwitterFiction project, writing a story on Twitter one tweet at a time. I am very pleased to say that it’s going very well.
Chapter 4 was finished earlier in the week, and we are right into the meat of the story now. I am very glad that I planned the major plot points of the story ahead of time now, otherwise I would have likely tied myself up with some inconsistencies. I am not aware of any just yet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
I have achieved my goal of writing every day so far. The principal reason for commencing this project was to allow me to write while seemingly having no time to do so due to time commitments with work and family. I have proven to myself that I really do have the capacity to write a story around the rest of my life.
Publicly writing the story is a great motivator as well. It means I can’t slack off for a day, and it also means I can’t rush ahead and write too much. This may seem counterintuitive, but when you are writing with a one-pass, no-edits paradigm, then you need to be very sure that what you write is right out of the box.
“The Body in the Building” is currently 7794 words long and progressing nicely. I don’t take word count as a good metric for progress or even success. I’ve read plenty of stories that were many, many pages long but at least half those words could have been cut and made the story more readable and lose nothing.
I can’t give an estimate of what the final length of “Body” will be when done. It will be the exact length it needs to be to tell the story. I don’t know how long it will take to finish either, perhaps another four weeks, perhaps more. Again, it will take as long as it takes to finish and have the story complete.
I will say that I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience. There has been increasing interest on Twitter as I write; hopefully, I am engaging an audience as they read along with me. It’s baring your soul a little, writing in such a raw, uncensored way. I think that some may find it refreshing to be so open with my writing process.