What a Tweet it is to read these short stories

They say that brevity is the soul of wit. That certainly was the case for the winners of Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest announced today.

Twitter allows users to stay constantly connected with friends and family by sending and receiving short messages called Tweets. People who are interested in someone's random musings can "follow" them.

The free social networking service has taken off in Silicon Valley. It recently raised $15 million in funding, handing Twitter a valuation just shy of $100 million. Twitter was created by a San Francisco start-up called Obvious.

So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a literary challenge: write a short story in 140 characters, the maximum length of a Tweet. More than 300 brave souls took part, showing off their ability to choose just the right words, sentence structure and punctuation to squeak under the character count.

The winning entry came from Ron Gould: "'Time travel works!' the note read. 'However you can only travel to the past and one-way.' I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill."

Second place went to ...

... Anthony Juliano: "Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head."

Thelonius Monk came in third: "When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven."

Melissa Pierce got an honorable mention: "Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge."

Derek also got an honorable mention: "The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes."

Check out the winners here. Check out all 331 entries here.

Who knows, as our busy lives add to our increasing attention deficit, TwitLit could become a whole new genre. We wager Ernest Hemingway would have been proud. His famous six-word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," inspired a Wired magazine six-word story contest of celebrities and authors.

-- Jessica Guynn

Comments

[Daniel Smith]

Thanks for the link to my site (where I had collected all the entries in one place.) If your readers enjoyed Copyblogger's TwitLit contest, they may also enjoy the one I launched. It ends Wednesday and was inspired by the original, but with a twist: Can You Put the Wit in Twitter? Check it out and throw your hat in the ring if you consider yourself a master of brevity! (The link in my name should be the right one)

Daniel Smith
Smithereens Blog:
Persuasion, Productivity and Prose