Short Summary: The protagonist gets a text message from their husband late at night and goes to pick them up with their dog.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
22 Rules of Storytelling, according to Pixar
My livetweet thread is based off of an old story I wrote back in 2018 for a Creative Writing class. It was a 4.5 thousand word monster that, even to this day, takes 600 years to read and all my willpower not to jettison my only digital copy into the sun.
Despite this, I figured that I might as well put all those hours I’ve spent workshopping this story to good use.
Some of the feedback I got regarding my story were the following:
- the writing was too extravagant
- not knowing the gender of the protagonist distracted from the reading experience
- the middle to end of the story was confusing to read
I thought by transcribing my story’s middle into a livetweet format, I’d be able to address all of the issues, while creating an engaging story for Twitter.
Lots of details had to be cut for the twitter story, including some key genre elements, but since Twitter has a 280 character limit, I’d thought it’ll be better to simplify everything. In addition, since one of the advice given in the readings was to write the way you talk, I went for an even more focused approach and tried my best to show and not tell using practices that would most engage a digital audience.
The original story can be read here but I don’t recommend it as the tenses are all over the place.
The Story Spine of The Twitter Thread
Once Upon a time… there was a person with a twitter account (we shall name this unnamed protagonist: P).
Every day… P liked to sleep through the night uninterrupted. Like a normal person.
But, one day… P woke up to a text from their husband, Quinn, begging to be picked up from an unknown location after getting assaulted by another unknown person, named Betty White.
Because of that… P has to leave the comfort of their bed to go pick up a drunk Quinn who has inconvenienced a senior citizen.
Because of that… P enters a wooded area to pick up Quinn when they lose their dog.
Because of that… P runs through the woods in a frantic state of mind, trying to find their dog in almost pitch black. The light from their flashlight doesn’t help as much as they’d like
In the mean time, they’re trying hard to remember an old jumpscare video that took place in the woods, much like the ones they are in now
Because of that… P gets even more scared and extremely paranoid about all of their surroundings. They are now almost an hour in the woods and alone with only a sliver of light for vision.
Until finally… P starts to think there’s something behind them when it gives chase. 10 minutes later, it is revealed it is only Quinn, their husband.
They are still paranoid, which leads to a cryptic
To which they do not update the twitter thread for 20 minutes, whereas they were previously updating every ~10 minutes. When they do update, they reveal that the two of them are now back home and P is going to take a Nyquil, presumably to fall asleep as soon as possible to escape their night out in the woods
And, ever since then … life returns to normal except P’s dog is still missing.
EXSM 3989 - Digital Storytelling Class Blog 