Why Talk About Twitter Basics and Best Practices?

This year I switched the focus of my social media efforts to Twitter, because it seemed to me Facebook was an increasingly ineffectual way to reach fans. Because of that, I’ve been spending a lot more time looking at the people following me on there as well as thinking about Twitter, its philosophy, and its uses overall.

Why does a writer want to be on Twitter? The reason is more than just “sell books”. It’s often a way to network with existing fans (who will buy more books in the future), cultivate new fans, connect with peers and other industry professionals, to find out industry and writing news and yes, of course, to procrastinate in a thousand different ways.

I used to automatically follow people who followed me but nowadays I spend a few minutes to click through and look at their page and the tweets it contains. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are doing it “wrong,” or at least in a way that ends up detracting from their purpose. Most of these are easy fixes. Here’s some tips for setting up an account on there and as well as for maintaining a presence.

The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for finding random input to use when rewriting is Stumbleupon.

For example, that’s how I found this marvelous tool, the N+7 Machine. It describes itself thusly:

The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. Here you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following.

I have a story, “The Ghost Eater,” that’s been sitting for a while that I need to return to, so to whack myself on the side of the head and inspire an interesting rewrite, I ran the first two paragraphs through it, in the hopes that looking at them might spark some new ideas that I could use in mapping out my strategy for the rewrite.