Thomas Beller (@thomasbeller) on using Twitter as a way of getting to a first draft:
I composed a short piece, something between a journal entry and a personal essay, in a series of tweets. I wanted to recount an experience but wasn’t sure what I thought of it, and suddenly the idea of writing in public seemed like it would force me toward a further understanding. I wrote it out at night, when I do most of my writing. Something about tweeting at that hour reminded me how it once felt to talk into my friend’s C.B. radio —that strange precursor to the Internet and its “communities”—way back when. Except, in this case, I wasn’t pretending to be a trucker. I was pretending to be me.
I found the experience to be strange, exhilarating, outrageously narcissistic, frightening, and embarrassing. In other words, like writing. But also like acting, or playing a concert—something whose essence is bound up in the fact that it’s being done live. You can’t really see the auditorium and don’t know the size of the audience. It’s like throwing paper airplanes out a high window: someone may see their elegant dive, maybe a lot of people. The plane will be rushed onward and out of sight. Except there is now a record of it. I assumed my series of tweets was a draft. They were not pages crumpled on the floor, exactly—more like pages to be stacked up and put aside, where, like some gourmet dish, its elements might have time to blend.
A day or two later I assembled the tweets, revised them into a short essay, and sent them out for publication. I didn’t say how the first draft had been written. This is how I thought of those tweets, as a first draft, one which would lead to another draft and maybe another and another, until I thought it was ready to be published, which it was.
See also: Twitter as a machine for book invention
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