Finding inspiration: Twitter

Twitter is my current favourite form of social media, because it has a lot less of the rubbish that is ubiquitous on Facebook. It's also a great source of inspiration for writers. 

If you don't already have a twitter account, then it's worth creating one. These are some of the ways it can inspire you:

• Follow the writers you love - most authors have a Twitter feed these days, and they can be amusing, encouraging and give great insights into the life of a writer. This can be especially encouraging when you get a rejection letter!
• Writing prompt feeds - there are so many writing feeds out there, ones that promote competitions to ones that offer writing prompts, picture prompts, story prompts to get you writing. Do a search in Twitter for writing prompts to discover these. 
• Writing competition feeds - this is another wonderful source of inspiration, giving you information about upcoming competitions that you can consider entering.
• Writing exercises - I particularly enjoy the six word story prompts from @WriterlyTweets - they are great fun, and have helped me learn to write carefully choosing the words I use. 
  
• What's happening, and how people are reacting - I love the immediacy of twitter. If you keep an eye on what is trending, you can see major events unfold, and how the public are reacting to the event. Very often, news is picked up on Twitter long before the local news find out about it.Watch out for fake news though!
• Research - you can also find about a particular topic through researching it on Twitter. Sometimes this is really helpful if you want to gauge public opinion on a topic before you write about it.

As with any social media, do be careful not to spend too much time getting sidetracked!

Happy writing.