Artists are always ripping new technologies, bending them to their own purposes.
When I first heard the word “blog” around 2002, my immediate thought was how cool this new medium would be as a delivery system for fiction. The Appleseed, my first venture, was presided over by an entirely fictional character, “Baba Ray,” the wacky American guru from my unpublished 60s novel, Applestock Nation.
Twitter launched a few years later, and seemed to me just too nerdy to be useful. 140 characters? Tweets? Please. But when Brian Clark sponsored the first Twitter fiction contest on Copyblogger, I began to see a new light. Could THIS could be what Twitter was really for?
Well, it’s not, of course. But Twitter fiction may yet become the haiku of its generation. Think of it–a story in 140 characters. After writing a few of these suckers, the looser “flash fiction” forms seem awfully roomy by comparison. And writers (who take to challenges) are setting up more and more fiction-only Twitter accounts every day.
I’ve jumped in – you can read my Twitter fiction at Truevoice.
Here’s another – Jeremy Griffin’s Tweettales.
And Twitter Fiction, a website devoted to the genre, wants submissions. Take note.
Finally comes Twiller, a Twitter novel written (or tweeted) in real time, by NY Times reporter and comic book writer, Matt Richtel. As described by David Rothman on Teleread, the main character of Twiller wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia and haunted by a feeling he is a murderer. “Possessing only a cell phone that lets him Twitter, he uses it to tell his story of self-discovery – 140 characters at a time.”
You can be sure Twitter fiction will be with us at least as long as there’s a Twitter. Should Twitter give way to something newer and cooler, well…who knows? Watching the moment-by-moment evolution of digital literary culture is fascinating – just one more reason why I’m glad to be alive in these crazy times.
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