NEW YORK -- One of the newest forces in publishing is helping to
revive an old tradition: Serialized fiction. When the first Twitter
Fiction Festival kicks off in New York City this week, the
micro-blogging platform will highlight 29 authors as they post new works
of fiction in 140-character bursts.
"Twitter is a place to
tell stories," wrote Twitter's Andrew Fitzgerald in a blog post
announcing the event. "Often those stories are about news, or politics,
or perhaps sports or music, but it turns out Twitter is a great place
for telling fictional stories, too. As one professor from Michigan State
University says, 'Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary
practice.' We want to celebrate that."
A panel of festival
organizers hand-picked a wide range of genres and concepts to feature.
One participant will re-tell 100 Greek myths in 100 tweets. Another
plans to invite Twitter users to help her write epigraphs for
gravestones. Twitter also will showcase the serialized story of five
strangers trapped on a bus, an exploration of censorship in China, and
an interactive writing game that will involve the wider Twitter
community.
"With this kind of medium, serialized writing can
be taken in a totally new direction," said Johannes Neuer, associate
director of marketing at the New York Public Library, which is hosting
in-person facets of the festival. "All of the sudden you have readers in
real time, and an opportunity to really incorporate the reader much
more than previous generations of authors could have done."
Twitter
has been a playground for storytelling experimentation before. The New
Yorker magazine carried out a high-profile experiment on the platform
with author Jennifer Egan, who tweeted installments of her story "Black
Box," before the magazine published it in its entirety last May.
Comedians
routinely have used the platform to tell stories or share vignettes in
installments. Last fall, writer and actress Mindy Kaling posted a string
of fictional observations about New York Fashion Week.
"Took
off heels and pretended to be Malia Obama to sit in front row at Prabal
Gurung," she wrote at the time. The series of tweets also included mock
details of a dramatic faux romance with actor Adrien Brody. More
recently, a parody account pretending to be New York Times polling
analyst Nate Silver tweeted a psychedelic election-night journey. One of
those tweets: "I am islanded in a stream of stars. Motes of datum gleam
overhead. Am I their projection, or are they mine?"
Some may
cringe at the idea of subjecting literature to the sometimes haphazard
and rapid-fire unpredictability of a Twitter stream, but even
now-sprawling classics have fractured roots. Celebrated works like "Anna
Karenina," "The Brothers Karamazov," "Madame Bovary," and much of
Charles Dickens' work first reached readers in snippets published in
newspapers. But one of the goals of this festival is not simply to
replicate serializations of the print era.
"Just taking paper
books and putting them online, there's something not-so-beautiful about
that," said Yael Goldstein Love, a novelist and co-founder of Plympton,
a new publishing house that specializes in serialized fiction. "Part of
what is really exciting about the Twitter Fiction Festival is it gets
writers all over the world to think of other ideas, ways the online-ness
of it enhances the story."
Goldstein Love was one of the
judges who picked participants in the festival and says she was struck
by the kinds of narrative experimentation Twitter encouraged. She says
one entrant described the way his story's tempo -- and in turn the
frequency with which he published tweets -- would vary based on what was
happening at any given moment in the story.
"This guy saying
he would change the rhythm depending on how much action there was, that
kind of blew my mind," Goldstein Love said. "That can have emotional
resonance. These are the kinds of things we just don't even think
about."
Since it launched in 2006, Twitter has become a space
where people play with narrative conventions. While the platform's web
origins make it part of the disruption that has turned the publishing
world on its head, Goldstein Love sees the creativity generated on
Twitter as a harbinger of good things to come for the industry.
"Especially
seeing all these submissions -- some from established writers, some
from people who have never published a word -- it really puts to death a
lot of doom-and-gloom rumors," she said. "People are imaginative and
people are excited about publishing. Publishing is going to have to
change a great deal, but so long as people are brimming over with
creativity, I'm not at all worried."
Ryan Chapman of Penguin
Press echoed that sentiment, calling Twitter one of the "green shoots
for narrative storytelling" that keeps him optimistic.
"Maybe
it's something to do with the fact that Twitter's maturing into this
new space where people are so used to seeing it as a news source or
conversation source," Chapman said. "As a reader, Twitter's obviously a
place where everybody's already gathering for exchanging news and
conversation. If people can use it as another part of their toolkit to
create stories, that's really exciting."
— Adrienne LaFrance, Digital First Media
Labels: fiction, Twitter, Twitter Fiction Festival, twitter literature
RSS
