Twitter–One Line Wednesday

I love one line Wednesday: #1lineWed. It’s become the highlight of my Twitter week.

Kiss of Death chooses the theme (@RWAKissofDeath). Every week there’s a new pinned tweet at the top of her Twitter feed. Sometimes it’s an idea, like water or names or coffee. Other times, it’s a page number from a manuscript, like page 2, 22, or 222.

So you find a tweet that’s in line with the day’s theme, and you tweet it with the hashtag, #1lineWed. Other people who like your work retweet it. I’ve had people tell me they can’t wait to read my book from them. I think it was the ‘It was the best ass-whooping I’d ever had’ line that did the best.

Kiss of Death has some guidelines that are on the pinned tweet, but I’ll share them here anyway:

• No buy links. You can link to your blog, but no links to say, your Amazon page.
• If you wish to be retweeted, you should retweet as well. That’s not to say you have to retweet stuff you don’t like. But there’s plenty of tweets to choose from, so that really shouldn’t be a problem.
• The main purpose is to have fun. Put your best foot forward and find out what others are writing. It’s great interaction.

So even though I’ve had people tell me they want to read my book from them, the main purpose is really just to share. The instant feedback is also nice–some lines don’t do as well as you think they will, while others turn out to be surprisingly popular.

I’ll add another guideline. If it’s a theme that’s no good for your writing, sit it out. As an example, on the week the theme was water, I was just learning. I didn’t even know one line Wednesday had a theme. I was tweeting from Dragon Hoard, which was really almost a diametric opposite, since it had a fire-breathing dragon.

Annalisa Christensen (@Alpha_Annalisa) was really kind about it, though. She just told me about the rules and invited me to tweet about water. But I had bupkiss. Not a darn thing that would do me any good. People drinking a glass of water, going to fetch water, etc. So I sat the rest of that one out. I didn’t (and still don’t) see how tweeting filler details from your novel is going to do you any good.

My friend, Tae (@Shaolindian Tale), on the other hand, was having a field day. She’d written a novel where her protagonist was a water elemental. She had tweet after interesting tweet. So I spent the rest of the day retweeting her stuff, as well as some other lines that appealed to me.

It’s just the luck of the draw. Coffee’s going to be merely okay for me. I actually batted the idea back and forth with another Twitter friend (@ShunterNi) about writing a short that had coffee as a plot point, but revising took up too much of my mental energy for me to get to it. I didn’t have any great ideas, and I didn’t want to try to force one that was just okay.

And that’s all right. Other people will have good lines, and I’ll enjoy reading and retweeting them.

[By the way, I highly recommend following all the people I named above on Twitter. You’ll get some interesting stuff in your feed–not just ads. :)]

About cathleentownsend

Avid writer and reader of Faerie tales and noblebright fantasy.