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For my Live-Tweet story, I decided to write about a fictional debate between two “friends”. The debate consists of one friend, Danny, arguing with another friend, Brett, on a classic dudes-hanging-out topic: who would win in a fight between a grizzly bear and a silverback gorilla? I felt it was a compelling enough story to warrant sharing on Twitter, and provided me with the ability to draw in the reader and keep them hooked until the end.

I started with what I thought was an appropriate Twitter story introduction, and made sure to continue introducing new elements to the conversation to avoid the story becoming stale. I wanted to provide any potential readers with an easy-to-quantify conclusion. As in, you can debate the topic of animal in 1v1 combat, and you can live tweet about that debate. But how do you give the reader a satisfying end to that 10 tweet journey? I decided to dedicate two tweets at the end to listing the categories that were touched on throughout my story. Bite Strength? Gorilla wins that one. Armour? Grizzly has thicker skin so he’ll take that. The final tally was 6 to 5 in favour of the Grizzly, and with that, my story came to a conclusive end.

Taking cues from the required reading, The Non-Writers’ Guide To Writing Better Social Media Copy, I figured that writing in as natural a speaking voice as possible made for an easy to read story. No need to add big words or over format. A twitter story is not judged on its punctuation, but on its story. Another cue I took from the aforementioned article, was to add visual elements. Admittedly, these were lacking a little, but I added emojis where I thought appropriate, to break up the sheer wall of text that is 10+ tweets.

Take a look if you like! And thanks for reading.

Interesting convo happening within my friend group at the moment. Danny is currently arguing with Brett over what would win in a fight, grizzly bear vs silverback gorilla. Surprisingly heated conversation. Will update. #EXSM3989

— Nelson Edwards (@edwards_ne9120) July 17, 2023

I chose to tell the story about Marley our Rottweiler came into our lives, at a difficult time. It’s a heart warming story of Jake who was lonely after losing his best friend Tito. And Marley who needed to be rescued, from a local animal shelter.

From reading one of the required readings for this module, I learned about the elements of the story. Whether you’re writing a novel or crafting a tweet, all story telling shares the same common elements: Setting, Character, Plot, Conflict & Arc. In my Live Tweet, I covered all of these topics.

Live Tweeting was fun & exciting to do. It’s not something I have done before. It gave me a different perspective on how to tweet. I’m going to Las Vegas in October, to attend the P!NK Concert & I’m going to use what I learned in this module, to live tweet during the show!

The heart warming story of Jake & Marley #EXSM3989 pic.twitter.com/uNTythycXA

— SaraTheCulinaryCanuck (@Sara_Meier609) July 17, 2023

Over the past week, I have been trying to buy a new car. This story actually goes back much further – like a year ago when I first started my search. It has now become a pressing issue. I guess the car industry is still playing catch up after the pandemic so this is my live tweet on my recent experience of trying to buy a car when there are no cars to buy.

” The non-refundable deposit is for all my hard work I have done over the past week” Car salesman

Using the story arc:

1. Stasis-Everyday Life

Need a new car, don’t really want to buy a new car. Leave it until the last possible moment.

2. Trigger-Event outside the control of the protagonist (Can be positive or negative)

Limited turbo engine vehicles available to buy, no real negotiation happening.

3. Quest-Rising Action (Result of the trigger)

Get what you can take.

4. Surprises-Unexpected Events (+ve or -ve) (Commonly Challenges) (Don’t let protagonist complete his/her Quest)

Stressful car salesman tactics.

5. Critical Choice-Decision is key to the Story, Reveals the protagonist’s true character.

Fills out the paperwork to buy the car.

6. Climax-Decision leads to the climax, highest level of tension for reader.

8.49% interest rate!

7. Reversal-Outcome of the Critical Choice and the Climax, results in changes for the characters, should be logical and based on the events leading up to it

Leaves the dealership. Still looking for a new vehicle.

8. Resolution-Protagonist reaches a new stasis, characters should have evolved learning important life lessons through their experiences.

Read my live tweet here.

If there’s one thing people would say to describe me, it is crazy cat lady. But how did I become a crazy cat lady?

The story starts when I was 7. Growing up in Turkey, I saw cats everywhere every single day. I really mean it… Turkey is known for the amount of street cats we have. 99% of the time, these cats are absolute gems and they love nothing more than getting pets from strangers.

My little cousin’s domesticated cat on the other hand… was quite the opposite. If she could talk, I am quite certain that she’d tell the entire world how much she hates my guts.
One day when went to visit my cousin and her family, the second they opened their front door to welcome me, their cat just jumped at me with her claws out.
I don’t know why she wanted me dead so badly but she continued to pester and bite and scratch me for the next 3 hours of my visit. And when I left my cousins home that day, I just knew I never wanted to touch a cat ever again.

This hatred I had for cats lasted until I was 20, when I moved in with my roommate Dini. Dini fostered around 7 cats a year (which I did not know when I agreed to move in with her). When I arrived at our new apartment for the first time I saw the little note that she left me, asking me to take care of her little foster while she was away for TWO FULL WEEKS.

TERRIFIED would be an understatement of how I felt for the first few days with that cat. I left the living room whenever he walked in, I avoided eye contact and never attempted to get in his personal space… until one day he just decided to come and sit on my lap.

And that was the day I realized I am the biggest cat person. And four years later, there is nothing I love more than being around cats. I foster around 2-5 cats a year myself and I am the go-to person for all my friend’s cat-sitting needs.

This week I am cat-sitting my friend’s cat Stanley. You can follow our adventures here!

I will give you some background information about Stanley and I’s adventures from this week’s module!

• Setting: Stanley will be staying with me in my apartment. This is the first time he is staying anywhere other than his dad’s (my friend) place.
• Character: Stanley is a rather shy boy. He is very skittish and definitely is having some separation anxiety as his dad never left him alone since he got adopted last year.
• Plot: You are about to find out if our story is a story of forever best friends or just distant acquaintances that will never hang our again.
• Conflict: I do not want to spoil our story… but can’t say Stanley likes me as much as he likes his dad.
• Arc: Our story goes from Stanley arriving at my place for the first time to his first night here.. All I can say is that it was not a smooth sailing for either of us.

Experience the Wait Room in Real Time at U of A Emergency Room

The one thing everyone wants to avoid is the one thing I now have to do. It starts with a small complaint, an itch, a painful stomachache. Now we're off to the U of A ER to see what can be done. Bets are on – how many hours will we wait? #EXSM3989

— Mark Ma (@voiceimage) July 16, 2023

My wife and I went out to grab some breakfast before doing a bit of Edmonton thrifting. But after taking one bite of the bagel she had ordered, she told me there wasn’t something right. Her stomach was overwhelmed with nausea, cramping, and acid reflux, so badly that she couldn’t eat anything. We decided to go to the University of Alberta Emergency Room to seek out help she wasn’t getting from her primary care doctor – which led us down a completely unexpected adventure I decided to live tweet about for our class.

The Adventure

My wife was registered in the hospital at 1:34 pm, with nurses at the front station saying it would be a 3-4 hour wait. Within the first half hour of being in the room, I realized a few things:

1. Why can’t they have couches in the waiting room? Anything has to be more comfortable than metal chairs.
2. Why can’t they have a TV in the waiting room? It would help to distract my wife and all of the other ailing people there when patients start to scream, major accidents come rolling in, or just general hospital issues crop up that don’t make anyone feel any better.

Despite being in the emergency room, and having a sick wife, we both felt that we were receiving the best care possible. Watching these men and women run back and forth through the halls, sorting through all of the emergencies and medications and knowledge, was truly a feat to observe. As the day unfolded, I could see the story unfold simultaneously. From an unhappy to start to a positive end, where she got the care she needed and I understood how important good medical care is, it was a story I felt needed to be shared.

My Writing Style

Going to the hospital can be a scary thing. My wife can attest to that, given she put all her symptoms away into a pocket, hoping that she could just make them go away instead of having to go to the hospital. It was important for me, then, in writing this story, to emphasize over and over again how kind – truly kind – the ER doctors at the U of A hospital were to us. Humor was something I felt I had to integrate as well, because without it the ER is clouded in a shade of grief and horror – something noone wants to read about.

And yes – our doctor was the McDreamy of Edmonton. Thanks Dr. Kyle.

Enjoy my live-tweet thread, about how some deer mice totally derailed the first night of our family vacation.

How it All Went Down

For many years, I have been going to Jasper every Summer with the fam. This particular year was different, though, because we quickly came to realize that we were also vacationing with a family of deer mice! Seeing one zoom by with a hotdog in its mouth set the bizarre, creepy tone for the night. Normally we’re filled with nothing but peacefulness when we’re here, likely due to the freshest of air, the crystal clear lakes, the gigantic mountains that make you feel like not just an ant, but an ant in heaven. And the cabins!!! They’re so wonderfully warm and cozy. Normally I could rave for hours about how cabins in Jasper are my favourite place to be in the whole world… until this night happened.

After seeing the deer mouse with the raw weenie in it’s mouth dart into a hole underneath our cabin, I had a strong hunch that our night was going to get weirder, and it did. From mice treating the living room like a 100-meter dash, to my dad standing on guard in his underwear with a hotdog roaster in-hand, to getting one last Jack-in-the-box (more like rodent-in-the-box) type scare – this trip definitely wasn’t short of surprises. Even though we lost a night of our vacation to stress and paranoia (and the whole experience made me develop a newfound fear of mice, lol), we gained a strange and hilarious story that my family and I will always get a major chuckle from whenever we look back on it.

Writing Style

I channeled my inner Paris Zarcilla to bring a sense of immediacy and comedic hysteria to the tweets. I was also influenced by Tom Taylor, to convey a horrific scenario in a funny way, and include some unexpected, edge-of-your-seat thrills in a way that reads like a suspenseful chapter book. I used the occasional ALL-CAPS word throughout my tweet thread as a vehicle to emphasize emotion. I also wrote in an un-serious, witty way to emphasize the organic, improvisational nature of Twitter threads, and aimed to convey the same vibe of rapid thought bursts.

I also incorporated photos, memes, and gifs to enhance the level of humour in the story, in hopes to make it more digestible and relatable for readers.

Mighty, Micro, Mousy Moments

Gary Vaynerchuk notes the importance of story-telling in “micro moments” and “finding ways to tell a story that grabs your attention the moment you take out your phone and scroll through various social platforms.” He explains “that’s the game we’re playing” and “that’s what you have to focus your energy on.” By keeping that in mind, I felt that I was able to create a more enjoyable, succinct, unique, cliff-hanger story. By writing in quick snippets I was able to highlight real, fast human reactions and emotions. Creating this short snippet-style story through Twitter has shown me that micro moments can still be mighty. And I can certainly say the same thing about mice now, too – even something so small can make a big statement.

I chose to tweet about a childhood memory that’s never really been forgotten. A classic 90’s Dad move where he decided to leave some of his kids in the car to run a “quick” errand, because he thought it’d be too much work to bring them along.

A POV story from my five-year-old self, the memory evokes the fear and panic I felt on that day. It turns out that my Dad had only been gone for less than 10 minutes. However, in the heat of the moment, stuck in a car with a crying kid, it felt like we’d been abandoned for hours.

Out of all of Module 2’s readings, I felt the most connected to the Eight Point Arc:

• Stasis: Teresa and her weekly piano lessons
• Trigger: Dad leaves Ken and I in the car. Ken starts crying and won’t stop.
• Quest: I need to get Ken to stop crying.
• Surprise: Since it’s Fall, the sky is getting darker earlier. We’re surrounded by multiple apartment buildings and in a full carpark. I don’t see a single soul around. It feels like hours since Dad left us.
• Critical choice: Do I leave to find Dad? Do I bring Ken with me or not?
• Climax: I decide to open the door.
• Reversal: Dad shows up just as I opened the door.
• Resolution: I realized that not as much time had passed as I’d imagined. Dad also realizes he never should’ve left us alone and I never should’ve tried to leave the car. Ken stops crying and we head home for dinner.