a piece of my mind

About Twivortiare

I can’t remember what got me to do this in the first place, but one morning, this thing hit my head: hey, what if a character that I’ve created in one of my books has a Twitter account?  What she/would say?  

Well, to say I had too much time in my hand or that I was bored at that time is probably not far from the truth.  So yes, that morning of January 23rd – which was alos around th time that I was experiencing the so-called writer’s block in the middle of finishing Antologi Rasa - I set up a Twitter account under the name of @alexandrarheaw, tweeting as Alexandra Wicaksono, the female lead in my 2nd book Divortiare.

I didn’t promote that thing first, I just tweeted once in a while, and suddenly I realized that it was growing followers.  And you know what, some started speculating that Alexandra was real.  That the book that I wrote a few years back was about this one real woman.  So before it got carried away, one day I just tweeted in my personal account @ikanatassa that now they can follow @alexandrarheaw as the spin-off of Divortiare.  Well, whaddayaknow, at the time I wrote this, the @alexandrarheaw got some twelve-hundreds followers.  Which for me, is kinda … wow.

What’s more wow, though, is how the followers - in this case, my readers - react to the tweets.  They ask questions, they comment, they express their emotions towards some of the things that I tweeted as if this Alexandra character is a real person, and suddenly I’m in this weird, cosmic, unfathomable interactive relationships with the followers.  Which is totally new for me.  I didn’t even know that their comments and questions could actually lead me to making up stories as we go.  At one point, I think I got really really creative that I said to myself ‘I can’t believe I’m tweeting this shit but it’s fun.’  @alexandrarheaw’s tweets, like all Twitter ramblings, are plotless, spontaneous, chaotic, just like how a normal, living person lives his/her life.

What amuses me more is that some followers actually took the liberty of creating their own spin-off Twitter account.  Before I know it, now the husband is tweeting, the best friend is tweeting, hell even the housemaid of the character is tweeting.  Which I found hilarious.  And I don’t mind, really, hey if one Twitter account that I started could ignite others to explore their own creativity, why not?

I personally don’t know if this is going to be a trend now or in the future.  You know, the whole an author tweeting his/her story instead of writing it in a book.  A couple of other people have done something called ‘twitterature’ - a smart amalgamation of ‘twitter’ and ‘literature’, don’t you think?  In it, these two guys, Achman and Rensin,  wrote humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer.  I bought and read the book, and I must say, I quite enjoy how Hamlet was tweeting, Harry Potter was tweeting, Anna Karenina was tweeting, and a whole bunch more.

And didn’t ‘Shit My Dad Says’ start from @shitmydadsays?

And then there’s this article in Time magazine - ‘Twitter Lit: A New Creative Outlet’ - in which they explained how writers are shaping their work to exploit technology.  Which is actually kinda true.  Authors used to write on stones, leaves, paper, and now we’re writing on our laptops and iPads.

Twitter is often blamed as the primary cause why writers can’t write.  I’m just trying to prove the opposite, and have fun doing it.  

PS: Here’s Twivortiare release schedule > pre-sale via Twitter/online ended January 27th 2012. Book store release is scheduled around May 2012.