“It was the best of tweets, it was the worst of tweets…”

Twitter and literature — should we file this combo under ‘never-the-twain-shall-meet’? After all, how could War and Peace possibly—

Aiyoh, turns out they’ve already met-lah, and given birth to twitterature (or twiction). Notable examples here.

Micro-serialization can entail either: (1) taking pre-existing novels and breaking them down into tweets, or (2) creating fresh fiction for Twitter. (Rick Moody of The Ice Storm fame recently published his short story via 153 tweets over 3 days.)

In twitterature, the interplay of three factors (number, frequency and quality of tweets) can cause a tech-savvy author to salivate, and a tech-averse one to palpitate (not in a good way). And yet these factors are familiar to anyone who’s tried to tell a story, regardless of medium – it’s about pacing; how to sustain; what to tell now and what to save for later; what to keep and what to edit (get used to 140 characters).

Other Twitter-enabled projects have gone beyond serialization. One project involved James Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel chronicles events of a single day, June 16, 1904. The Twitter project had over fifty characters from the book tweeting about what they were doing on that day, as per the novel.

So is twitterature here to stay? Does it fundamentally change the way fiction is written and read? For now, it’s enough to make you reconsider the nature of fiction, and maybe even accept that the next War and Peace will come to us one tweet at a time.

“Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.” — First line of Tolstoy’s epic novel (93 characters, with spaces).