If you were allotted 140 characters, including punctuation and spaces, could you tell an interesting story?
That’s the challenge that was thrown down by Brian Clark at CopyBlogger, a website devoted to improving your writing.
Can you tell a story in exactly 140 characters?
That’s the idea behind the first ever @copyblogger Twitter writing contest.
It should be a great exercise and a lot of fun. Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation.
The rules for his contest are simple. You need to use Twitter to write your story, it must be exactly 140 characters long, and it must be interesting. The best story wins a 4 GB iPod Nano. Not only that, but I’m going to sweeten the deal by offering a digital copy of my book to the best running related story!
In order to be eligible for a copy of my book about Marathon Preparation and Recovery, your story must have something to do with running or walking. It can be related to a race, to training, to walking on a nature trail, or even to watching somebody else run or walk. You must also leave a link to your Twitter story in the comments below. If you want to be eligible for the iPod, you should also leave a link in the comments over at CopyBlogger, of course. There is only 1 entry per person allowed, so make it a good one. That being said, you don’t need to enter the same story into his contest and into mine, since mine has a content restraint.
Here is an example (and my entry into Brian’s contest):
http://twitter.com/BlaineMoore/statuses/815241805
I passed 1st place at mile 19. I mustn’t let anyone catch me. I am getting so tired. There’s the finish line! The course record is now mine.
By the way, if you sign up to Twitter and want to follow me, you can do so at http://twitter.com/BlaineMoore.
(New to Twitter and not sure what to do or how to use it? Click here for some simple, step by step directions.)
So start getting creative, writing your 140 character stories, and leaving a link here so that I can read them all! The deadline is this Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 6:00 EDT.
What a fantastic idea! I’m a huge Twitter fan (http://twitter.com/HellaSound) so count me in. I’ll come back by the 23rd with my Tweet.
That was pretty tough actually.
http://twitter.com/crossn81/statuses/815429992
http://twitter.com/kmark99/statuses/815625234
http://twitter.com/academicdave/statuses/371256622
I think the trickiest part was getting Twitter to play nice today 😉
http://twitter.com/HellaSound/statuses/816049357
http://twitter.com/AEngelsrud/statuses/816028454
Hi Blaine, here’s my entry for your Twitter contest…
Thanks for the fun, I think we need to do more of these in the blogosphere! 🙂
Hi Blaine, here’s my correct entry for your contest, please disregard my previous comment (I didn’t finish my story in that one)
Thanks again, this was a lot of fun. 🙂
Hi there,
I came here via your trackback on Copyblogger- nice blog!
I just recently got turned on to Twitter with the CB 140-character contest, and I am finding it pretty cool.
By the way, as for the contest itself, I was getting fed up with trying to read all the entries, flicking back and forth between CB and twitter, so I put together an aggregated list where all entries can be viewed in one place. If you share the same frustration, you may want to check it out; just head over to my blog, a quick explanation and links to two different views are there.
Cheers,
Daniel Smith
Smithereens Blog
Thanks for the entries! I’m printing them out and my wife and I will choose a winner on the plane this afternoon. A winner will be announced either when I get back or (possibly) sometime this weekend if I have net access.