Making of Project III

The Making of Project III: Postmodern Twitter

Pitch:

I walked into my pitch meeting for Project III pretty sure of what I was going to do. I had a fairly thorough draft proposal, because I had been thinking about my remediation since I started drafting Project II. I was confident that my idea would be well received.

I had decided that I was going to attempt to write short stories in the postmodern genre. I had compiled a long list of characteristics of postmodernism from the research that I had done in Project II, so I thought that I could write something that would be a clear example of the genre. I thought it might be like postmodernism for beginners.

my initial pitch in my writers notebook

However, as I presented my proposal, my professor, T, voiced concerns that this project would be too lofty for the time period that we had. She thought that it would be too much to take on, given that I had never written in the style and I did not have any already formed plotlines for my stories. I agreed with her, but I did not know what else to do.

The other classmate in my pitch meeting then suggested that I look for a platform that I could put smaller chunks of writing on, like Twitter. He thought that it might be cool if I post tweets from a postmodern author. That way, people unfamiliar to the genre could be exposed to it without being too bogged down by some of the more confusing characteristics (like nonlinear plotlines, ect). With only 140 characters, I could show my audience what postmodernism was, without making them work too hard for the understanding.

So from there, with my classmate’s idea in tow, I decided to completely change my Project III, so that it would be more manageable, and so I would be able to really delve into a new medium: Twitter.

Drafting:

As I started to draft my new project, I had trouble deciding on what kind of Twitter profile to make. I debated between creating a handle like @ThePMWriter, where I could tweet random thoughts from a theoretical author, or creating a fictional author that tweeted her own thoughts. Ultimately, I decided on the latter, because of a quotation from If on a winter’s night… by Italo Calvino, that I had written down in my notebook: “The author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions." I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to create a fictitious author.

I set out to create a profile, and I settled on the name Katherine Crosby. Katherine was the first name to pop into my head, and Crosby is my mother’s maiden name. I decided that she ought to live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because that is where I would want to live if I wrote for a living. Initially, I imagined her as a middle-aged woman, but I then decreased her age when the draft tweets that I created sounded like they were from a young voice (the result of me writing them). The profile picture was a picture of a picture that I had taken while in Spain, and it depicted a woman looking serious. I thought the picture inception was appropriate for postmodernism, and I thought that looking for a real picture of a real, random woman would be too strange. I choose my cover photo to be a picture of a garden of flowers, but after some advice from T, I changed it to a picture of stars and clouds, because both of those images reoccurred in my tweets.

The most significant drafting that I did, however, was creating a master list of original tweets. I wrote them first in my notebook and then in a Word document, so that I could lay out the structure before I put them on my timeline. It was difficult to get started, but once I got into a groove of writing short sentences, they came fairly quickly. I mostly pulled inspiration from my writers notebook, where I had taken notes about If on a winter’s night… and the postmodernism research that I had done.

I collected 40 of the draft tweets that I thought were the most successful, and I brought those, along with the basic Twitter profile that I had created, to the class to be workshopped.

my tweets written in my notebook

Workshop:

The feedback that I received during workshop was extremely constructive. Everyone had different ideas for my Twitter profile, and everyone gave me their perspective on my draft tweets. The most beneficial comments that I received were about whether or not I should include unoriginal content (i.e. retweet people and included links and pictures). A lot of people said that they wanted my Twitter profile to look like any other profile out there, meaning that they wanted to see more interaction with other content on Twitter.

After the workshop, I sat down and thought about what the purpose of my Twitter should be. Initially, I wanted it to be a platform where my audience could be introduced to postmodernism. But as I explored Twitter and its uses and conventions, I realized that my profile should be a way for my fictional author to explore the genre. I think that as a byproduct, the audience viewing my Twitter would be interested by the links and posts, and then they may be inspired to do their own research or explore the genre further. I think that this purpose more closely mirrors the conventions of Twitter and the kinds of profiles you are likely to see.

Consequently, I started to put my tweets on my Twitter, while I interspersed retweets, links and pictures that I thought reflected postmodernism or that directly discussed the genre. It was difficult to find postmodern content on Twitter, so there are only a few retweets, most of which are quotations from postmodern authors. I think that as you scroll through my timeline, there is a good balance of original and unoriginal content, and there is an element of multimedia that makes my timeline diverse. The pictures and links also break up the chunks of text, which are less visually pleasing.

I tried to tweet roughly five times each day, so that the timestamps on the tweets were a little spread out, so that it more closely resembled a real Twitter. In total, I ended up with about 60 tweets.

In addition, some of my classmates suggested that I follow more people, so that more people would follow me back. I followed postmodern authors, regular authors, literary magazines, and book reviewers, for a total of 30 people. It was difficult to find people to follow who tweeted only about postmodernism, so I expanded my search to writers in general. But I think that this accurately reflects what any authors’ followers list would look like.

Afterthoughts:

I am very happy with how my final Twitter turned out. I think that it looks legitimate, and I think I found interesting content to share. Moreover, I am proud of how my original tweets turned out, because they successfully demonstrate some of the characteristics of postmodernism. I think that they are also fairly clever, so I am proud to display them on my profile.

Looking back, I do wish that I had started putting tweets on my profile earlier. I think that if I had done so, I would have been able to double the amount of tweets, and I would have been forced to find even more postmodern related articles and media. I thought at the time that it would be better to draft my timeline, but now I think that Twitter as a platform does not lend itself to drafts; it lends itself to exploration and mistakes and spur of the moment comments.

I am thinking about keeping this Twitter alive after this project ends, because I have had a fun time trying to generate content. Moving forward, I want to try to generate more followers and create more original tweets.