Hello.  My name is Andy Coughlan and I’m a Twitterholic.

There, that feels good.

Being somewhat addicted to Twitter these days, it’s been bugging me for some time why it is that so few screenwriters appear to be on there.

Having had Scribomatic running for some time now, it’s clear to me that Screenwriters like to blog – we love it.  At its best our blogging is educational, entertaining and enlightening, at its worst it’s irritating and condescending.

But whatever we put on our blogs, the act of writing our posts doesn’t really help our own screenwriting. Blogging, as a writing form, is far more akin to traditional prose writing than it is to screenwriting.

Screenwriting is about being concise, of excising all waste.  Every line of action and dialogue must move the story forward – if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there.  We all know that (I hope).

Now with Twitter you only 140 characters to play with, so every Tweet you write is a fabulous exercise in concise writing. Over the past few weeks my grammar and vocabulary has been constantly challenged and my use of redundant phrases and repetition exorcised like never before.

It’s really paying dividends with the new screenplay I’m writing.

But even more than that, it’s fantastic for building relationships.  Far better, I would argue, than posting comments on each others blogs. I guarantee you’ll meet up with interesting and intelligent people… if you want to.  I certainly have.

I’ve hardly checked my feed reader in the past few weeks, in part because I was annoyed I couldn’t go to Cheltenham and didn’t want to read about the fantastic time everyone was having, but mainly because Twitter is such a vibrant and interesting place to be.

It’s happening, right now, right there in the timeline. A lot of people I follow announce their latest blog posts into the timeline as well, so the need for feedreaders diminishes further. And with apps like Twhirl it’s there all the time on my desktop. I don’t have to go surfing around to see all the comments sections of peoples blogs to have conversations.

I’m not saying we should stop blogging, but I suspect that if more of us tweeted, the overall quality of the Scribosphere would go up.

So this is a call to all the screenwriters I know, jump in – the waters warm. And when you’re in, you can follow me here.

In fact, if you’re already on Twitter, or after you’ve joined, post your details in the comments section here so we can find each other…

Useful Links:

Twitter – the big daddy and the place where most people are.  Yes, it’s had its problems over the past few weeks, and the Fail Whale has been making regular appearances, but last weekends upgrades appear to be doing the job.

Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca, Plurk – Pretenders to Twitter’s throne, each with their own subtle twist (I like Plurk’s timeline, I’m not worried about file sharing).  If you’re unsure which to pick, stick with Twitter.

Twhirl – A great desktop app.  Also works with your Friendfeed account, posts to Jaiku and Pownce as well,  and they’re just introducing Seesmic integration (more on that in another post soon).

Tip:

Don’t follow too many people to start with – there is a tendency for people to be a bit gung-ho and follow the world and his wife, then drown under the weight of Tweets coming in.  Try to keep the number of people you follow less than your number of followers (difficult to start with, easier the more useful tweets you post and interesting people you follow and talk to).

Futher Reading:

Michael Leis at New Media Buzz has an excellent post on Microblogging and Screenwriting which elaborates on a lot of my points above.