Culture

The Rise of Twitter Fiction

Authors are turning social media into a literary genre, 140 characters at a time.

By Olivia Goldhill and Quartz
Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

The award-winning author David Mitchell is writing a new short story, and you can read his work-in-progress on Twitter.

Over the past four days, Mitchell has intermittently posted tweets from the perspective of his narrator, an obsessive stalker and hacker. The story is told in the style of slang-filled tweets, rather than 140-character snippets of narrative. But the Twitter handle @I_Bombadil is a reference to a Tolkien character, and there are frequent cultural allusions amid the hashtags and emojis.

This isn’t Mitchell’s first piece of #TwitterFiction (he’s tweeting this piece to promote his upcoming novel Slade House, which has its origins in a 6,000-word Twitter story, “The Right Sort”). And Mitchell isn’t the only respected writer to take Twitter fiction seriously.

Philip Pullman spent several months tweeting the tale of Jeffrey the housefly, Pulitzer prize-winner Jennifer Egan published Black Box via The New Yorker’s Twitter feed, and Margaret Atwood was one of many established authors who took part in this year’s #TwitterFiction festival.

There’s no doubt that writers’ interest in Twitter fiction is partly driven by publishers. Authors are encouraged to use social media to engage with their readers, and a large Twitter following can translate into strong book sales.

But while Twitter may be filled with snarky comments and aggressive trolls, there’s no reason why stories with serious literary value can’t be published via tweets.

Melissa Terras, a professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, says that every literary medium has some kind of constraint, and Twitter is simply the latest restriction.

“It’s the role of literature to play with forms,” she said. “In poetry you have very rigid forms, and people have to operate within those constraints. With Twitter fiction, people are taking the limitation of 140 characters and doing something creative. It’s a slightly different art form and it creates a different experience of fiction.”

Authors have already embraced several different styles of writing Twitter fiction.

Rita Raley, an associate professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, said that Mitchell’s latest piece of Twitter fiction seems less compelling than his earlier work, though his use of modern vernacular “could work quite brilliantly.”

Meanwhile, Raley describes Egan’s Twitter story as “short poetic exercises,” where atomistic tweets are strung together to form a narrative.

She points to Teju Cole’s series of seven stories on drones as an example of fiction that can be told within one 140-character tweet.

Not everyone is convinced that Twitter fiction should be taken seriously.

But, as Terras says, resistance to new literary mediums is inevitable. In the Victorian era, critics were aghast when production-press technology became more advanced and allowed authors to write longer novels. “You had all these critics saying, ‘The books are too long, they’re awful,’” she said.

But as writers embraced the new medium, readers and critics came to celebrate their work. Perhaps the today’s avant-garde authors of Twitter will be just as convincing.