Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream
It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.
In 2012, before it descended into wordy 240-character journalistic one-upmanship and tribal warfare, Twitter hosted a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.
According to Twitter, it had hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter bragged it has even inspired some literary criticism.
To get into the spirit of things, and without delving into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this 140-character, short story:
Reading list:
✓ Nanoism is an online publication for twitter-fiction: stories of up to 140 characters.
✓ Craig Taylor, Charlotte Mendelson, Louise Doughty, John Niven, Victoria Hislop, Val McDermid...Top writers try their hand at writing a story with only Twitter's 140-character limit to play with (Guardian).
✓ Well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – come up with a tweet-length story: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels (Guardian).
✓ 13 Beautiful Pieces of Twitter Fiction Remind Us How Powerful Reading Can Be by Anne Charlton (Mic).
✓ Twitter Fiction: "No Constraints, No Joy" by Isaac Fitzgerald (Buzzfeed).
✓ Twitter Fiction Reveals The Power Of Very, Very Short Stories by Maddie Crum (HuffPost).
✓ Consider Twitter Fiction by Anthony Santulli (The Review Review).
It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.
In 2012, before it descended into wordy 240-character journalistic one-upmanship and tribal warfare, Twitter hosted a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.
According to Twitter, it had hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter bragged it has even inspired some literary criticism.
To get into the spirit of things, and without delving into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this 140-character, short story:
On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the desolated creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.
Reading list:
✓ Nanoism is an online publication for twitter-fiction: stories of up to 140 characters.
✓ Craig Taylor, Charlotte Mendelson, Louise Doughty, John Niven, Victoria Hislop, Val McDermid...Top writers try their hand at writing a story with only Twitter's 140-character limit to play with (Guardian).
✓ Well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – come up with a tweet-length story: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels (Guardian).
✓ 13 Beautiful Pieces of Twitter Fiction Remind Us How Powerful Reading Can Be by Anne Charlton (Mic).
✓ Twitter Fiction: "No Constraints, No Joy" by Isaac Fitzgerald (Buzzfeed).
✓ Twitter Fiction Reveals The Power Of Very, Very Short Stories by Maddie Crum (HuffPost).
✓ Consider Twitter Fiction by Anthony Santulli (The Review Review).
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