How do you write a story in 140 characters? It’s simple. Action, reaction, and a twist.

Start with a basic concept. And by basic, I mean really basic. The space limitations of Twitter won’t let you write War and Peace, or even an O’Henry story. But it will let you get a cute little story down if you keep it simple.

Then figure out how to tell it. What happens? Which action starts the story off? What reaction brings the point across? And what twist or ending wraps it all up? Ideally you’ll have no more than one to three sentences at this point. Then trim it down to 140 characters.

Here’s an example to illustrate these principles. The science fiction/fantasy twitter fiction magazine Thaumatrope put out a call for February-themed submissions. This got me thinking about Valentine’s Day with its associated traditions: romantic dinners, chocolates, valentine’s cards, candy hearts…hmm… what can I do with candy hearts? What if, in the future, candy hearts were laced with nanotech robots that caused the person who ate them to do the thing written on the candy? Eating a LUV ME heart would cause the person who ate it to fall in love with the person who gave them the candy heart. Sort of a high tech version of a love spell. Cool. There’s the concept, and the prompt for the action.

So who would use something like this? Well, again in the vein of keeping it simple, let’s go with a girl who wants to a guy to fall in love with her. So the action is that a girl gives a guy a LUV ME candy heart laced with nanotech robots. What’s the next step?

The next step is the reaction. What happens? We could go a couple of different ways with this. It could work, it could fail, something bad could happen, the guy could do something,,,but I decide I want it to work. In fact, I want her to feed him another, then another, until he agrees to marry her (what can I say, I’m a romantic.)

Next I need a twist. Something needs to happen that makes this a story, not just a sequence of events. A twist could mean that the technology fails, that someone interferes, that the guy finds out, or anything else turns things around and creates an ending to the story.  I decide that I want this whole plan to backfire on my heroine. Guess I’m not such a romantic after all.

Now comes the hard part: communicating all that in just 140 characters. I start with the action – feeding the guy the candy hearts, then blend in the reaction – he agrees to marry her, then cap it off with the twist – she gets fed a candy heart he leaves for her.

So this is the final version, 140 characters long,  published by Thaumatrope on Feb. 14:

“Fed my guy nano-laced candy hearts. KISS ME, LUV ME..the bots sealed the deal with MARRY ME. Yum! A blank one..uh, why did I sign a pre-nup?”

I enjoy writing these; finding a concept that works in such a restricted format and then whittling the words down to just the right ones is lots of fun. Try it yourself and see.