Twitter fiction: Creating whole worlds in 140 characters or less.

As a writer I am intrigued by twitter fiction as a genre.  I originally didn't think much of it because what I love about writing is the ability to use language to convey details in both landscape and character.  I felt that the confines of twitter were too constrictive to produce works of any level of interest or meaning.  What I found instead were writers who were using these confines to hone and perfect their skills with language.  I was humbled and inspired by the capabilities of these writers to convey so much with so little.  And I am inspired to read more and perhaps even try it myself.

To research this post I mainly used the keywords twitter fiction and twitterature.  I found quite a lot of material this way and didn't really feel the need to expand upon my search beyond this.

I included these elements because they showcased the experimental and innovative uses of the twitter format, not only the constraints of the character limit but also incorporating the social immediacy and crowd-sourcing aspects of twitter into the stories themselves.  I felt that Andrew Fitzgerald's TED did a great job of discussing ways in which writers are experimenting with this format and tried to find other examples of this.

I also was interested in the ways that twitter fiction can not only re-write existing literary texts but can also be adapted and reformatted into these cross-media formats, i.e. books and online publications.  I appreciate the ability to read these stories outside of the noise of twitter itself, where the story is embedded within timelines and is added onto with replies and comments and re-tweets.  While these things can be elements of the experience itself, it is nice to be able to get the story in a more traditional manner as well.  I am really interested in the idea of stories crossing platforms and existing in different forms within these platforms.

I don't know that my post gives a "full picture" of the issue. I did choose to focus on the aspects that I was most interested in.  There are certainly other aspects of twitter fiction that could be explored in an academic essay such as whether re-writing existing texts for twitter can bring new audiences to these texts or prevent the audiences from experiencing the authentic voice of the original author. Using twitter fiction as an educational tool for second language english learners is also an interesting topic that could be explored.

This is a topic that I am definitely interested in exploring further and as I said, I look forward to reading more twitter fiction and thinking about ways in which I can perhaps write my own in the future.