#twitlit

A recent donation of Dan Sinker's brilliant The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel got me thinking about the changing nature of storytelling. @MayorEmanuel's story was written, bit by bit, during the 2011 Chicago Mayoral elections, and it was posted to the @MayorEmanuel Twitter account as it was written. Dan Sinker, who was at the time anonymous, parodied the campaign exactly- he knew, from following Emanuel's staff online, where the real Emanuel was at most times- and the account eventually gained over 50,000 followers. After coming forward as the author, Sinker published the story in book form.

Dan Sinker's story did everything a good book should do and more: it was hilarious, poignant to the point where I cried, had a deeper meaning, and even managed to make me more interested in the real Rahm Emanuel. The characters, from Quaxelrod the Duck to Carl the Intern, were real. On top of all of that, the real-time nature of the story added so much. @MayorEmanuel's disappearance into the time vortex happened at exactly the moment of one of the loudest thunder-claps during the ridiculous THUNDERSNOW storm in 2011. Since then, during some bad storms, tweets encoded in binary manage to come through from wherever @MayorEmanuel is now...

Well-known authors are beginning to look at Twitter too. Recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad) published a short story called Black Box on Twitter in ten parts over ten nights; she did this with the help of the The New Yorker and through their Twitter feed (@NYerFiction). Tweets were sent out once a minute at a set time each night, in contrast to Sinker's story. Black Box was later published in print in The New Yorker.

Some people have grumbed about this use of Twitter; they have called the stories bumbling and hard to follow, while others have critiqued it from the other end by saying that Twitter should be spontaneous rather than pre-written. There is an argument that Twitter stories cannot be real literature (this same argument is used regarding self-published e-books, and I confess that I dismiss it). I suppose that like everything else, Twitter Literature is a matter of taste. TwitLit (Twitrature??) is not going to eclipse other kinds of story telling, but it will add new shades and variations to the rich and diverse ways that humans are already telling stories. You can tune in if you want to.

New and old authors alike will no doubt become more and more creative with their mediums. Forget Twitter, and even e-books! Who knows what stories will look like in the future? Experimentation is happening at an ever more rapid rate, and these next few years will be fascinating. 

Q: What is "twitlit"? A: It's a piece of literature written on Twitter, you twit. I'm writing this in tweets, then gathering bunches of them here. 

He awoke to find that his hair was on fire. Calmly, he lumbered to the bathroom and immersed his head in the basin. 

"The Bong!" he thought, and rushed to the bed. There it lay like some angular teddy bear, its lifeblood spent on the pillow. 

Was this what his life had come to? He cast a wary glance at his bookshelf. Gibbon's Decline and Fall glared at him accusingly. 

He pictured himself walking the five blocks to the laundromat, wobbling like some demented toadstool under the damp down comforter.

This was not the academic life he had pictured for himself: a shabby one bedroom apartment. The smell of bongwater and cat pee. 

Some Oxfordian fantasy of his youth – Tolkien and Lewis tweed-clad and gossiping in made-up languages - was to blame for all this.

Barthes Roland was his actual name. Some kind of intellectual joke by his ne'er do well (yet highly literate) prankster parents. 

As a matter of principle he had somehow managed to avoid reading even one word of Roland Barthes in his seven years of lit grad school. 

Barthes glanced at the brown plastic clock – hanging from the cord off the bedside table. 10:30. "Fuck! The Meeting!" He exclaimed. 

He donned a tweed cap to cover the melted clump of hair, a pair of brown corduroys and a Hemingway-esque fishing sweater 

He shuffle-dashed across the quad, passing an anemic looking man whose face would distort every few seconds into a terrifying grin. 

It wasn't clear whether this was a facial tic or some kind of warm-up.

Barthes was late. He squared his shoulders, strode into the faculty room and plonked himself down prominently in a beige chair.

The chair – one of those molded plastic affairs with metal legs – listed alarmingly to the left. Barthes played it cool.