so i have sometimes told people that the way i tweet is by not filtering myself very much but on reflection that's not really true. actually there are a bunch of categories of tweet that i regularly filter because i think they're unhelpful, mostly dunks / complaining
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i guess i just apply different filters from most people. i don't filter for professionalism almost at all eg, i am happy to tweet dumb jokes because if i can't make dumb jokes on twitter then what are we even doing here. proud of this one:
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[guy who invented dryads] dude what if trees were slutty
[guy who invented naiads] i see you and i raise dude: what if water was slutty
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i'm not really sure how to describe what i am and am not filtering for. simplest description is maybe something like i write the kinds of tweets i want to read from other people
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focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
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in his group writing course said "what makes writing good is the sense of human presence on the other end" and that really stuck with me. that's more what i'm trying to get at with "unfiltered" - i try to write like a person and not like, say, a corporation
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i think sasha went on to say something like, that means readers will be willing to forgive a lot of other flaws in writing if that sense of human presence is there, which also really stuck with me and feels really true of a bunch of my favorite writing, incl. tweets
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sort of a funny example but the first one that came to mind to illustrate this point is an essay written by an MtG player called "stuck in the middle with bruce." it's really good, oozing with personality, even if it's not exactly polished
articles.starcitygames.com/articles/stuck
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rizzo doesn't write like a guy who graduated from an MFA program, his writing i think (?) deliberately signals working class; he writes like a guy telling you a story in a small-town bar when you're both a few beers in and it's a good vibe and he's good at it
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the main thing i've heard from people who want to tweet more but are censoring themselves is stuff like they feel like their ideas aren't interesting enough or smart enough or original enough to tweet which is mostly not what i filter for, although a little bit
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another way of describing the question i ask myself when tweeting is something like: do i think reading this tweet will help people? that's a quite different game to play than trying to come up with impressive ideas, it doesn't necessarily have to be about ideas as such at all
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holding that question i think naturally leads to thinking about the mechanisms by which writing changes the people who read it. i have a short thread about this here, the tldr basically boils down to focusing on what you want to see more of again
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i’m noticing that when i read writing, on twitter or elsewhere, that is visibly trying to change the people reading it in some way, i try to guess its “theory of change”; the author’s working model of how writing changes people’s behavior. a rough provisional taxonomy:
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this is pretty good too. i think i'd say that i write for like a weighted sum over everyone i've ever had a DM conversation with, however short (including them just going "hey i liked this tweet you did!" and me going "thx!")
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Replying to @literalbanana
write for your ten weird friends and noone else
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