Twitter: Changing life for writers 140 characters at a time
From The New York Daily News Books Blog:
Creation through limitation is a concept that has long been familiar to writers.
We see it through the persistent use of ancient poetic forms such as haiku, as well as the experiments of the Oulipo — a French-speaking writers’ circle that can count Italo Calvino as an alumnus — in the 1960s. We still see it in many novels’ exploitation of genre conventions, and, according to Robert McCrum’s latest article in The Guardian, we also see it in the brevity enforced by microfiction and flashfiction competitions.
However, one increasingly pressing question is being asked by today’s twitterati: is this brevity, which has long been practiced — and which Shakespeare famously argues is the soul of wit — now being imposed upon writers by Twitter?
McCrum’s argument is that Twitter is changing literature. He writes of self imposed concision: “In the age of Twitter, such an innovative approach to narrative is peculiarly suggestive and potentially addictive.” Its hard to disagree.
We all know Hemingway’s six word story — “For sale: baby’s shoes, never worn”
Link to the rest at The New York Daily News and thanks to Mira for the tip.
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Brilliant!
When I started serializing my first novel, one of the things I wanted to try was to tweet each chapter. So I created a twitter account specifically for that, and decided that starting at 9PM EST I would start tweeting the chapter I’d posted the day before.
The thing that interested me was the 140 character limit. I thought of it as an interesting storytelling technicque. Where would I break each sentence? Where would I break each paragraph? I tried to imagine the limit as if twitter were a human reader, pausing for breath to continue, and to combine that with the natural beats and pauses of sentences, to see just how well it would work.
It was a mixed bag. In some cases it worked spectacularly. Exchanges of dialog went really smoothly, for example… someone could speak across three or four tweets and the rhythm worked. Longer sections of exposition were a little harder to pull off. But ultimately the entire experiment was a failure because my chapters were too long–I’d reach my “tweet limit” for the day about halfway though each chapter. So I tried that for three weeks then decided it wasn’t going to work out.
Someone, somewhere is going to use that as an argument in favor of me writing shorter stuff, but that’s just not going to happen.