Product Code Database
Twitterature (a portmanteau of Twitter and literature) is a literary use of the microblogging service of Twitter. It includes various genres, including , poetry, and fiction (or some combination thereof) written by individuals or collaboratively. The 280-character maximum imposed by the medium, upgraded from 140 characters in late 2017, provides a creative challenge.
On Black Twitter a form of collaborative poetry provides "clever and poetic critical commentary on the world around them" in a genre that scholars have called "digital dozens" , in reference to the verbal insult game known as the dozens. Contemporary Black American poetry has often been published on social media platforms rather than in conventional print publications.
140-character stories: fiction that fits into a single tweet.Jorge, Clinton, et al. "Storytelling and the use of social media in digital art installations." International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Springer International Publishing, 2013. An example of these stories are those written by James Mark Miller (@asmallfiction), Sean Hill (@veryshortstories), and Arjun Basu (@arjunbasu). A number of Twitter journals dedicate themselves to the form. In 2013, The Guardian challenged traditionally published authors such as Jeffrey Archer and Ian Rankin to write their 140-character stories, and then featured their attempts.
Fan fiction: Twitter accounts that have been created for characters in films, TV series, and books. Some of these accounts take the events in the original works as their starting point, whereas others may branch into fan fiction.
Epicretold, by author Chindu Sreedharan, is another noteworthy work in this genre. The New Indian Express called it an “audacious attempt...to fit the mother of all epics, the Mahabharata, into the microblogging site Twitter.” Tweeted from @epicretold, and subsequently published as a full-length book by HarperCollins India, "Epic Retold", HarperCollins. the story was narrated in "2,628 tweets" between July 2009 to October 2014. In an interview with Time, Sreedharan said it was an attempt to simplify the lengthy epic and make it accessible to the new generation—both in India and abroad.
One example of the Twitter novel is Small Places by Nick Belardes (@smallplaces), which began on April 25, 2008, with the tweet as shown on the right. Another example is The Twitstery Twilogy series by Robert K. Blechman (@RKBs_Twitstery). The first entry in the series was Executive Severance, which would be the first live-tweeted Twitter comic mystery (or "Twitstery"), beginning on May 6, 2009, with the tweet shown. The second Twitter novel in the series, The Golden Parachute, appeared as a Kindle eBook in 2016; and the third and concluding novel, I Tweet, Therefore I am, the Book 3, was released early in 2017.
John Roderick's Electric Aphorisms was composed in individual tweets between December 2008 and May 2009, and deleted on publication of the book itself by Publication Studio in November 2009. Traditionally-published authors have also attempted the twitter novel, such as Jennifer Egan's Black Box, which was first published in about 500 tweets in 2012; and David Mitchell's The Right Sort, first published as almost 300 tweets sent over one week in 2014. Hari Manev, who does not use Twitter, published his twitter novel The Eye, which is the first volume in his The Meaning of Fruth twitter trilogy, as a Kindle eBook in 2019. The first Russian Twitter-style novel by V. Pankratov "Юрфак.ru " published in 2013 in the publishing house "New Justice".
Twitterature has been called a literary genre but is more accurately an adaptation of various genres to social media. The writing is often experimental or playful, with some authors or initiators seeking to find out how the medium of Twitter affects storytelling or how a story spreads through the medium. A Swedish site titled Nanoismer.se was launched in 2011 to "challenge people to write deeper than what Twitter is for."
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