Character studies

My commute to work takes thirty to forty minutes by bus, twice a day. That’s a lot of time to be idle, so I’m trying an experiment.

Some of the time, I spend reading (or trying to read). All my life I’ve been plagued by the inability to read in a moving vehicle. I’d just end up feeling like throwing up. Surprisingly, I discovered buses affect me a little differently. I can read some of the time, but the nausea soon returns.

I wanted to keep my brain active in “writer mode”, so instead of staring blankly out the window or “through” the person in front of me, I decided to try and capture the essence of an interesting detail or person in 140 characters or less. I wanted each snippet to be compelling enough to raise interest and invoke desire to know more.

140 characters disappears fast, and for a few of my entries, I allowed myself to spill over into a second tweet. However, my goal is to keep it within one tweet as much as possible.

I don’t have a cell phone, so I can’t tweet live, so I have to write and rewrite the tweet in my head until I get home. That’s a good exercise in itself.

So far my experiment is going well. Here are the results of my experiment so far.

Photography: Pete Souza