But when you are writing short fiction like my Twitter account @twae you write very tiny books so the obvious route is just to storytell. Just a little storyteller who you follow for fun. But opening up my account to RT any stories addressed @twae for 30 minutes taught me a lot about the power of interactivity. Of course the storytelling capability is universal but we each have our own version from what we see. And catching glimpses of those various perspectives is an art on to itself.
My esteemed colleague Sean Hill @veryshortstory caught on to this very early and his invitation to post stories with the #vss hashtag is spot on. But when that other great Twitter storyteller Arjun Basu @arjunbasu tweeted good stuff (not stories) from the #140conf he ended up with a net loss of followers, some of whom took exception to his sudden interactive role.
But my experience was that 27 different authors participated with only the reward of a RT. It wasn't about the results, just the process. It might have been annoying to a few that an only occasional feed suddenly erupted in multiple tweets in such a short time. Maybe the blow was softened because these were still stories in the spirit of the feed. But the overall feedback was so positive and I think people really enjoyed giving a story a shot, in a different way to how they might enjoy reading a story. Interestingly the whole 30-minutes with lots of exchanges and @Twae references all over the feeds had no impact on my follower list. It just isn't about that when people get down to sharing ideas.
