One of the ways that software development has changed over the years is the way that developers are considered “good” at what they do. In the early days a good developer was a productive one – if you produced over 2000 lines of code in a day, you were good – quantity was more important than quality.
Things – and times – changed. As the personal and business computer world exploded, the lack of quality became a concern to organizations and consumers. If the code was malformed, or had lots of bugs, it didn’t matter how prolific you were – you produced inferior work. Additionallt, efficiency became a factor. If you could produce functionality with less lines of code, then you were a “better” programmer than those who wrote a hundred lines to execute a simple validation function. Tight, efficient “well formed” code was better…. and developers who did that were deemed superior… most of the time, at least.
Which brings me to a parallel I see in the writing profession, as well as Twitter.
For professional writers, there’s two types of opportunities – the “paid by words” type of job and the “contractual obligation” job. In the former, the more you write the more you are paid… and the temptation to “pad” is one that many fall prey to. I’ve found this is usually a short term gain, long term loss – you may be prolific, but the weighty bloated tomes you produce block opportunities that exist in the “contractual obligation” space… where you are contracted to write a book, of a certain length, but one that is expected to be appealing to readers and sell in significant numbers. You still have a “threshold” to meet, but you have some wiggle room – though if you produce too many purposeless words you end up winning the battle and losing the war… you may sell one book, but never another.
Thus, I believe a focused prose should be the goal… Writing as tight as efficient as the aforementioned well-formed code that separates the good developer from the great one (I consider both creative endeavors, by the way).
Which brings us to Twitter. In Twitter, you have a fixed constraint. 140 characters. It’s democratic, it’s simple, and it’s in-the-moment. It focuses the mind, in the same way that a hangman’s noose focuses that of a condemned man. Of course, most people don’t look at Twitter as a “writer’s medium.” Understandable, when most tweets are about inane observations and statements of the egocentric moment.
I obviously disagree. I love Twitter, and I think it is a great communication medium, giving us the opportunity to exchange ideas and share at a visceral and pure level. It’s real and honest and true, and lets us capture our reactions and lives in the Now.
So, I tweet. It’s my ongoing diary of what’s going on. I’ve done it for a long while and I think I’ll keep doing it for the foreseeable future. I’m also capturing my tweets with automated tools and saving them to my blog, in my hopes that I can keep them as an archive of where I was and what I was doing in my life, to look back on and reflect. Like pictures… frozen moments.
Tweets from an earlier time.
So, tweet. Share. Communicate. And let Twitter be a tool to help you focus your prose and your mind.