Tell me how you're feeling

I've been doing a lot of thinking and writing for Digit this week, so in a self serving manner, would you like to look at one of my posts and tell me how you are? Thank you.

Write from the heart

Innocent have a lot to answer for, it has spawned numerous chatty, friendly styles of writing. I like to think their hearts are in the right place, after all, they are selling fruit in cute little bottles, the man from Del Monte is doffing his hat in admiration, everyone likes fruit right? 

So it's good to know that even though Coca Cola are putting investment into this smiley 'little' company, those three fellows who started it all can still pen a convincing letter to explain to all their "drinkers and veg-potters" that they are not being swallowed by a massive corporation.

Here is a lesson in authentic and engaging writing. I'd still like to work for them...

Read the letter here.

Photo credit: clspeace with a Bowerbird overlay

LESS IS MORE

I stumbled upon the ‘FOUR LINE LONG POEM’ recently and it got me thinking, are we heading towards a succinct world? Is less, more? Or are we just getting lazier? Is brevity the new brainy? No flowery prose or verbose dialogue needed now, just tell it to me straight.

“HATE BEEF LOVE TOFU”, “KNOW TRUE LOVE ONCE”, “BALD DOGS LOOK PINK”

OK, so you could interpret these ‘poems’ as deep, ridiculous or just plain bizarre, but this montage of four liners is also telling of our concentration span. Tweets and Facebook updates have to be engaging enough to stop us in our tracks at least long enough to LOL back some kudos.

Perhaps this is merely the latest fashion of story telling, but currently we are actively encouraged to make clever use of limited characters. Hemingway toyed with telling a complete and very short, short story in six words, that’s 32 characters to you Twits out there. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”, he claimed it was his best work.

The best use of Twitter I’ve seen to date aside from Towerbridge’s personable, informative and human Tweets, “I am opening for the FGS Brandenburgh, which is passing downstream.” is the creatively succinct tales of TimKeyPoet. Key manages to paint a world in a few brush strokes and leave us asking questions and frankly wanting more; “Poem#171. “I’m not marrying that pig!” I said to mother. She continued to leaf through the portfolio.”

Short, short stories are not a new phenomenon and I’m not claiming as much, but haikus must be sagely nodding at Twitter and waiting for all the fuss to die down. In the mean time it concerns me that we might lose the ability to converse in more than 140 characters.