Has Twitter given birth to a new literary genre?
Fiction takes flight on Twitter when stories take the social network's connectivity seriously
Telling stories ... the social media site Twitter displayed on a mobile device. Photograph: Bethany Clarke/Getty Images
As the second #TwitterFiction festival opens for submissions, it's time to ask if the social networking site has given birth to a new, 140-character genre.
Maybe we should call it the storyella – Penguin US has already snaffled the term twitterature, assembling an anthology of "humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer" which perkily promises to provide "everything you need to master the literature of the civilised world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it."
So far so stocking-filler, but what of more serious projects? Those whose memories have not yet been reduced to 140 characters may remember one of the star turns of the first #TwitterFiction festival, back in the mists of 2012. In what could be seen as a nifty piece of marketing for an earlier book, the children's writer Lucy Coats told 100 Greek myths in 100 tweets, including:
'Nobody sees me naked!' Angry Artemis chases speechless stagboy in fatal hunt! Hounds tear Actaeon apart for pervy peeking
Snakes in Cradle Mystery! Baby Heracles strangles serpents with own tiny fists! Chief suspect Hera says 'No effin' comment'
Coats' myths series was funny and smart, but whether any of this year's projects can amount to more than self-promotion will be seen on Twitter from March 12-16 when the selected stories unfurl.
Whether by accident or design, the writer Teju Cole also chose this weekfor his own latest fictional initiative: a short story called "Hafiz". This 35-tweet tale unfolded over the course of a day, with Cole retweeting texts he had previously asked other users to tweet for him. It tells the story of the eponymous middle-aged man, who suffers a heart attack on the pavement of an unnamed city.
"His right hand was inside his shirt. He clutched at his heart and winced..." To reveal any more would be to strew spoilers before a story which Cole professes to take very seriously indeed. As he explained to the New York Times: "My story … is a creative cousin to works likeShelley Jackson's 'Skin,' a 2,095-word story that was told one tattooed word at a time on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers".
Overblown as that claim might seem, Cole has a point: the best fictions on twitter are forged from connectivity. They don't, however, necessarily involve narrative in a conventional sense. One gem last summer was a wheeze which purported to link great writers of past and present into a daisy-chain of literary association. The giveaway was that each name ended with "LPS".
I was reminded it when I heard about the death of the late, great Amiri Barak. Among the 19 "people" followed by his avatar, @BaraksterLPS, are Herman Melville (@HERMELVILLElps), and Louisa May Alcott (@LouisaAlcottLPS).
What fangirl's heart would not flutter to read the following from@mayaangeloulps: "Currently sitting with my new and dear friends :) @BeecherStoweLPS @EdithWhartonLPS @KateChopinLPS."
It's a network which offers an alternative to the sometimes mystifying connections of the interactive Literature-map, which has Angelou consorting with writers as diverse as Dante and James Herriot. LPS is arguably neither as original, nor as fictional as literature-map (Maya Angelou and James Herriot? perlease!), but it is fun to leap eras and cultures through a fictional string of follows, and the quotations you encounter along the way chime pleasingly with each other.
Perhaps the last word should go to the twictional Robert Frost, quoting himself: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life; it goes on."
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