Tweetplays

When I first joined Twitter, I found it an interesting variation on the old chat rooms of yore; only instead of listening to the voices of fellow geeks chatting over porn, politics, and the latest computer games, I was reading the random thoughts of a worldwide community offering opinions, aphorisms, jokes, observations, and links to blogs and news on a near infinite variety of topics. While I found the stream of humanity’s consciousness intriguing, I wondered what I could do to offer something different – to participate in the conversations in a way that would both engage listeners and myself.

The first of what have come to be known as Tweetplays came about as an amusing experiment in parody – riffing on a bit of ridiculous text someone had tweeted from a recent Glenn Beck novel. As it emerged, I began to notice two things: the off-the-cuff nature of the responses stimulated a creative voice that had, after twenty years of tech work, been stifled, and, that the delay between posting a tweet and actually seeing it appear in a timeline created a certain emotional resonance effect – a period of time where the words of the previous tweet lingered in the minds of readers waiting for a followup. This latter effect has become more interesting to me over time.

The initial Tweetplays were purely a lark – an experiment designed solely to amuse myself and maybe a handful of others – and I was genuinely surprised when a number of positive responses started coming in, along with encouragement to continue and suggestions for future topics. While I had never stated any formal “rules” for the game, one thing I knew I wanted to do was to preserve the spontaneity of the experiment; to see how long a muse could be corralled. Thus the first “rule” became: construct the tales in real-time, with no topics or plots picked out in advance. Initially, this proved a little difficult, and a I leaned heavily upon suggestions from followers (that I would gather up in the hour so leading to the start of a night’s play). As these were done on Friday nights, most people were looking for lighthearted material – something to take away the dull ache of a work week – so the text and illustrations were generally intended to be funny. Over time, however, as the stories became more complex, and I began to tinker withTwitter’s resonance effect, the pictures became more time-consumingly difficult to find and format*. As a result, illustrated tales have surrendered their prominence to the more wordy pieces in use today.

So that’s the history. Here, without further ado, are the Tweetplays themselves in the order they appeared:

I hope you enjoy these little experiments, and I’ll continue to add new ones to this list as they “air.” If you find them entertaining, please feel free to follow along on Twitter (@theangrymick), where I’ll try to do one each Friday night.

* There were also some serious concerns about copyright. While all the images used were marked “labeled for reuse,” it is a fact of modern law that no definition defies legal challenge.