From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of it

With every status update and tweet, the millions of individuals on social-networking sites are more than staying connected—they are reading, writing, editing, distilling, and interpreting the written word more than any generation in history. In doing so, they are helping develop Fiction 2.0: a fascinating marriage of character-count restrictions and the network effect that has created a new category of short-form content and narrative experimentation. This paper explores five of these new fiction prototypes—twitterature, nanofiction, crowd-sourced narratives, infographics, and $0.00 stories—in order to better understand how the e-age will cross-pollinate foreign concepts like “install-base” with familiar ones like “readership.” On themes of adolescent love, teen pregnancy, and terminal illness, the story “Love Sky” became the number-one selling novel in Japan in 2007. Its author, Mika, wrote it one sentence at a time—not at a computer or at a desk, but on her cell phone, sending it to her readers one line at a time. In a country where commuters read a few screens’ worth of narrative between subway stops, novels are not simply being written on cellular telephones, they are being devoured on them. In 2007, ninety-eight cell phone novels were published as books, five of which became best-sellers. A few, like Mika’s “Love Sky,” were even adopted into movies. Today, the Japanese cell phone novel market is valued at $36 million. Here in America, many would argue cell phone users are less interested in novels than Facebook Status Updates. I know I am. But the benefits of our social connectedness goes beyond greater sharing, awareness, and communication—writers in today’s e-age are using short-form content in fascinating new ways, marrying character-count constrictions and the network effect to crowd-source stories, experiment with form, and engage in direct-distribution tactics. While in Japan, the language itself is better suited for cell phone novels, here in the States the SMS screen may end up being more significant for how it is inspiring a new generation of mobile authors to experiment with prototypes for future forms of fiction. In this age of texting, the littlest texts may matter most. The most prolific texter of all time might have been Ernest Hemingway. Legend holds the author’s proudest work was just six words long: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He allegedly wrote the piece to win a bet— an experiment in and of itself—and it’s safe to say no Twitter feed in all its 140-character potency has chirped out anything so powerful. With just a few words, Hemingway crafted a compliment to the forms of fiction his audience already loved, that he himself had already mastered, and by revealing little, provided much—a prototype should the mainstream desire it. This essay explores five new fiction prototypes exclusive to today’s digital era. They are experimental, so much so that Hemingway himself might not have bet on them. But as the book and novel—the written word itself—fight to maintain a foothold against the sexier mediums swirling all around them, we owe it to ask ourselves what ecosystem is being built for the fiction of the future. After all, the millions of individuals on social-networking sites are more than staying connected with one another—they are reading, writing, EPUB