All of a Twitter in 140 Characters!

Yang-May Ooi is certainly quickly at home with new technology. While she was in Malaysia, she phone blogged her adventures. And now she's all of a twitter over a (relatively) new mini-blogging and messaging facility called ... Twitter.

Excited by the possibilities of this new medium, she is asking readers if they can be creative in 140 characters (like in an SMS message) to produce Twitter mini-flash fiction or digital haiku:

What I would really love to see are Twitterers who can write something interesting or thought-provoking in 140 characters so that I can have something worthwhile to read on my mobile phone - when I'm on the bus or hanging around waiting in between real-life events. So here's a challenge to all you flash fiction writers and haiku poets, can you Twitter interestingly, uniquely, fascinatingly, challengingly to entertain, bewitch, bedazzle and enthrall the masses on their phones? Let me know if you have such a Twitter account and I'll feature you on Fusion View!

She reckons that my local readership should go for this as Malaysians have short attention spans ... (now where was I?) ... and are joined at the hip to their handphones ... (just excuse me while I answer that ...)

140 characters! We thought we were pushing the limits with six-word stories, the other day!

And speaking of short short stories, here's one you must read - Julio Cortazar's post-modern piece A Continuity of Parks. Just coffee break length and magic.

Hot Weather Words

Our poetry blog
features the perfect haiku
for hot afternoons!

The Greats Haikued!

Goodness, it's such a slog to read your way through the classics and with all of us so busy these days ...

Thanks goodness for this guy David Bader who has reduced the most essential reads of world literature to 17 syllables in 100 Great Books in Haiku.

See if you can work out which books the following haikus summarise:

Advice for those
in a difficult position.
First, be flexible.

Lecherous linguist
he lays low and is laid low
after laying Lo.

Plagues, incest madness,
human pig-children. Dios!
Where did the time go?

First one to get each right buys me coffee!

More info on the book and more extracts here. Came across it while I was browsing the shelves of the new Borders in the Curve (definitely squidgy, and too many temptations).

Think you can do as well as Bader? Penguin have announced a competition where readers submit haiku about their favourite books. This could get addictive!

Kobayashi On Haiku

Haiku master Kyoji Kobayashi (sponsored by The Japan Foundation) ran a workshop at the Litfest last year. I think what he says about Haiku applies to all good writing:

You should write a haiku as if you were looking through a child’s eyes. It’s important to look for a new image – something that you will be taken aback by as you write.

You need to disregard all thoughts that have to do with prior conception. Write not about what you know, but about what you have just found out. And you need to be frugal with your words, grabbing only the essence. Leave out anything the reader can work out. At the same time, cram as much imagery as possible into the space.

Do not try to come up with a masterpiece because then what you write will be boring. Try instead to create something that the person next to you likes.

If the person on the right enjoys it,
so might the person on the left,
so might the person behind you …
and the person in front of you might just applaud.

This is how masterpieces are usually created.