Twitter...120 characters that change my writing!

I thought I would  quickly throw this together about twitter.  Many people reading this will be either addicted to, ops I mean will be active on twitter or some of you will not know about it at all...

For me, I joined twitter when I started my writing career earlier this year having read many books that said to join a social networking site to increase your profile and get your name out there.  I did like many do on twitter in the beginning and I followed the trending celebrities and spent most of my time just reading through what they were doing each day.  I did this for a while until I realised that reading through their tweets wasn't getting me any closer to my dreams of being a writer as I basically wasnt writing. 

As a new writer, begining to write for me was a mind field of do's and don't. A black hole, the bermunda triangle so many cliches to use. (Stephen King would kill me now for using them!!)  Having spend my working career to date in finance where everything was planned to the minute detail.  I had no room for error, I struggled on how to let my creative side out and just let it go because for the past 20 years, I never let anything just go, it was always planned, perfect and achieved its goal each time.  So here i am now, starting a new career at 40 in a world I know nothing about and one where your approach has to be so different. There are really no rules im told  but lots of books that tell you differently.  Plan, dont plan... do character charts, dont do character charts.. awwww runs away!!

When I finally found my feet, I found a group of people on twitter who seemed to be working away with their writing professionally and more than willing to share their secrets with me. They had a laugh on twitter together and seemed to me to be genuine friends, although they may be many miles apart from each other.   They helped each other out and promoted each other's writing and blogs.  They accepted me the novice, no writing skills person and followed me on twitter.  Replied to my tweets even the boring ones and made me feel part of the group, all offering best wishes or advice etc...

Im not going to mentioned them all as there are many but I am going to mention one because  tonight he  has probably described writing to me in the best way possible and I think this quote should be remembered forever by all the lost writers in this world who don't know where to start.

"I always think of it as a sculptor's block of marble.  You hack away at it first to get the basic outline. Then you chip away at it slowly to bring out the detail"

This little gem was given to me tonight by Derek Flynn who has been a great friend on twitter to me and given me so much direction from this little tweet that I will never forget it.  It will be forever in my mind along with my other favourite quote from spike milligan when asked what he wanted on this headstone. (although completely unrelevent to the blog but seriously funny) "I told you I was ill"...

Make sure you follow @derekflynn on twitter and thanks for the 126 characters (very rough estimate) that have probably changed my whole approach to writing and giving me the direction I lacked.!!

So finally it got me pondering life in general  and the millions of people on twitter and the different people we come into contact with,  do we randomly pick who we follow on twitter and strike up friendships with or is there a part of fate in it all..... well only time will tell and I owe Derek a few pints!!

Thanks to all my followers on twitter and the people that take the time to answer my boring tweets, you know who you are....it has all been greatly appreciated and started me on what I hope will be a very successful writing career!