Fooling around with words

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little" Tom Stoppard

Twitter is a great playground- a place where I can fool around with words and attempt to sharpen my concentration.

When I playing about I try not to focus on the grammar too much but muse on the sound of the piece I’m putting together.

Mindfulness is helpful as I focus on an item and try to describe what I see or how I feel. The weather lately has been shocking, in good ‘old Blighty’ and I find that my mood can be affected by lower than average light levels. (I need the sun to help me shine.) However on grey days I can be melancholic and reflective.

The limit of my playground is preset: 140 characters- which includes all words, spaces, punctuation and tags.

This makes me think about which words are shorter that can explain exactly what I want to convey, a bit like texting for the first time- it’s a phaf typing miserable when sad will do! And takes less time to type.

With Twitter ‘sad’ takes 3 spaces and allows me to convey/express more than if I use ‘miserable’ which would take 9 characters.

Thinking outside the box can lead me to using a sharper word, or one with a more exact meaning. It’s what most of us writers strive to achieve in our daily writing.

I try not to take too long over the #smallstone, as I fight the perfectionist in me because otherwise it would turn into a game of procrastination. And then nothing would see the light of day.

Yesterday’s smallstone was my attempt to describe the external atmosphere that hung about all day and took only 68 characters:

A low slung sky, those scumble glazed grey clouds brim full of driech #smallstone

So why not join me and a few others when we do our #smallstone and as this tag takes 11 spaces then I’m down to 130 spaces before I’ve even started writing.