I’ve written several micro-stories for Twitter, but inevitably tweets are drowned and lost in the thousands of tweets posted every second, which on average is actually 6,000 tweets per second. So I thought I would share my Twitter micro-stories for you here, just in case you missed them. Writing a micro-story for Twitter is no small feat if you ever want to try it yourself, you have 140 characters to play around with and that includes all your spaces and punctuation too. Here are four of my micro-story tweets and I shall explain my thoughts and ideas behind the writing for these pieces.

For this micro-story I was actually daydreaming about characters, more specifically creating characters and how our ancestors gifted certain circumstances and natural objects to human-like deities. You see it all the time in fables, folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales. King Arthur’s Lady of the Lake, Fairies and Sprites misbehaving, Irish Leprechauns and their rainbows and pots of gold, and Neil Gaiman’s Yvaine from Stardust. There are of course all the gods and goddesses right across the globe from ancient Egypt to Greece to the Middle East and China who often embody elements, planets and natural satellites. So being slightly obsessed with the night sky and stars I found myself picturing who I now call ‘the children of the stars’. I imagined them as children with smooth skin so pale that they literally shone like the stars they were meant to represent, I also imagined their nature as being adorable, fun-loving and slightly mischievous. I imagined that their hair would twinkle as though it held the stars and be stark white, including their eyebrows and eyelashes, and that the irises of their eyes would be silver. I also imagined they would wear white simple robes too and when I pictured them in my mind, descending from the stars onto the Earth, they played, laughed in a musical fashion and danced through the streets.

For this micro-story I drew upon my thoughts and many conversations about how adults seem to lose their child-like creativity, almost in a bid to seem more grown up when actually they end up rather boring and unsatisfied with their lives. Creative people are often dreamers, and I can’t imagine giving up my creativity just because some people think it is childish. It is sad that so many people do give up on their childhood dreams and creative aspirations, almost everything in our lives and the world around us was imagined and created by a dreamer. The child in this piece can be interpreted literally or metaphorically. As a metaphor it describes society and adulthood demanding that children and teenagers should give up on their creative aspirations and the character replying that they will not, because creativity ‘the child’ exists in everything.

For this micro-story I let my imagination run wild again. I was imagining myself as a child on a beach near where my grandparents lived and I could remember picking up large smooth stones and skimming them across the water just as my father had shown me. I actually imagined myself as the smooth stone being thrown across the water when writing this piece. The first six words refer to the stone as it bounces across the water, ‘sinking seven’ is when it stops after seven bounces and sinks out of sight, ‘a new silver dancer’ refers to the child selecting a new smooth stone to throw. This micro story may not be so clear and obvious as some of my other micro stories, but I think you can interpret the story from my words.

This micro-story was my first micro story and I wrote it when I lost my most prized possession, my ring. It was already loose on my finger but it slipped into the bin when I was cleaning up my flat and I didn’t notice. Luckily, I retraced all my steps and did find it, but for a few minutes I was extremely upset. ‘Flower of stars’ refers to my ring which to me looks like two six-pointed stars overlapping or/and a flower, ‘absence burned my heart’ refers to my state of panic as I tried to find it.

I hope this blog has been helpful and given you an insight into my mind and creative thought process, if you want to see more of my micro-stories then please follow me on Twitter @CaitlinLynagh. Also, I have some exciting news for you all, we will be introducing a new blogger to the ‘Diary Of A Young Writer’ on Tuesday the 15th of August, so keep your eyes peeled for updates and more exciting content!