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Byte-sized stories: Twittering a tiny tale

Some innovative authors have adopted Twitter as a new medium for writing short …

In the void between blogging and instant messaging, microblogging has emerged to provide users with yet another medium for electronic communication. Microblogging services, such as Twitter and Identi.ca, allow users to post short messages (140 characters or less) for their friends and followers. The technology offers a sort of universal back-channel for real-world events and helps bring Internet acquaintances closer together.

Like all new mediums, microblogging is ripe for artistic exploitation. New York Times writer Matt Richtel set out to test Twitter's literary potential by writing a "Twiller", a thriller story in 140-character increments. Richtel valiantly attempts to convey a cliché murder mystery—complete with dead hookers, an amnesia-afflicted killer, and (of course) Barack Obama.

Though intractably disjointed and largely incomprehensible, the piece has a strange sort of gritty charm. It reads like what you would get if you shoved Dashiell Hammett and Christopher Nolan into a room with a typewriter, a hacksaw, and a massive pile of mind-altering substances. My capacity to appreciate the inventiveness of Richtel's work could be a function of my own affinity for avant-garde literature, and I suspect that most sane readers would find it insufferable. Richtel acknowledges this himself, noting that "it's a short story with a proverbial long tail—albeit a short, long tail."

Aside from Richtel's epic Twiller, there are a handful of other equally intriguing experiments in tiny tale authorship. One of the most notable is the Very Short Story collection that was published in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine. The collection included numerous 6-word stories by widely-known science fiction authors and futurists. My favorite is this tiny masterpiece by "Firefly" creator Joss Whedon: "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so."


From Wired's Very Short Stories

A similar experiment was undertaken by Copyblogger earlier this year, which conducted a Twitter writing contest. The entries were evaluated by judges, who selected a handful of surprisingly solid stories. Writers can clearly create compelling tales in tiny tweets.

A much grander test of the microstory concept is taking place at Brave New Fiction, a proof-of-concept web application that allows writers to compose entire stories with one 140-character line every day. Erica Naone, an assistant editor at MIT Technology Review with whom I discussed microblogging several months ago, is one of the many participants who is writing a nifty story at Brave New Fiction.

Microblogging can clearly work with fiction, but what about more substantive works, like philosophical treatises? In a moment of intoxication inspiration, I came up with a quick Python one-liner* to compute how many lines in an English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's celebrated "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" are 140 characters in length or less. I discovered that a bit under half of the lines are short enough to be Twittered (and, as the philosopher would say, what we cannot Twitter, we must pass over in silence).

The ancient predecessor of the microstory from the hallowed age of print is 55 Fiction, a writing format pioneered by the New Times in which the author attempts to produce an entire story with a conflict, characters, setting, and resolution in 55 words or less. Although this phenomenon predates me, one of Ars Technica's resident Great Old Ones informs me that it was hot stuff during the Precambrian.

Microstories aren't going to replace conventional literature, but they are a clever use of an emerging communication medium. Much in the same way that haikus bring out creativity by imposing strict structural constraints, microblogging has the potential to challenge writers and force them to say more with less.

* Python one-liner: len([l.strip() for l in open("tractatus.txt").readlines() if len(l.strip()) <= 140 and l.strip() != ""])

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