Can you write a book in bursts of 140 characters? Say something about politics in your town? What can we do with thoughts exactly this long?
We know that Twitter is a social networking site with an aversion to lengthy conversations, but can it do more than spread #LiesWomenTell (a popular hashtag) or ask us to add interesting people to our feeds on #FollowFriday? Can Twitter really encourage artistic creation?
In the vein of the literary form keitai shousetsu, or the Japanese cell phone novel, writers are turning to Twitter to compose long-form narratives in byte-sized pieces. Cell phone novels take shape through a series of text messages with strict character limitations that are often sent directly to readers. Twitter novels expand upon this concept by using public Twitter accounts to reach a greater audience.
One well-known Twitter novel (@smallplaces) was composed over the course of nearly two years, eventually ending at just under 1000 tweets (If you’re doing the math, keep in mind that it’s 140,000 characters, not words!). Another popular Twitter novel (@140novel) coalesced over the course of just 37 tweets. It was written by three editors of the technology information site CNET, with each editor composing individual tweets to accompany the preceding messages. Digital parlour games, anyone?
In the realm of Twitter, a page of 37 tweets is called a novel. Some accounts, like Luc Sante’s @novelsin3lines, stretch the traditional definition even further. Sante posted tweets taken from the writing of French art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon. Sante writes that Fénéon "... came to spend half the year 1906 composing unsigned three-line news items for a mass circulation daily paper." Fénéon’s brief articles "...cover the same subjects as the rest of the paper--crime, politics, ceremony, catastrophe--but their individual narratives are compressed into a single frame, like photographs,” or as Sante later noticed, like tweets.
While some Twitter users aspire to short samples of high literature, others recognize Twitter’s potential for parody. Fake Twitter accounts for celebrities, politicians, and even cartoon characters are followed by thousands of Twitter users. One Chicago-based journalism professor discovered the widespread appeal of parody accounts during the city’s recent mayoral campaign.
Dan Sinker began an anonymous, but clearly parodic, Twitter account under the handle @MayorEmanuel. This Rahm Emanuel favored colorful language that tended to emerge through his varied command of a single, overwhelmingly popular four-letter word. The unexpectedly poetic penultimate tweet reads, in typical Mayor Emanuel style, “I can see a thousand f---ing skylines, and they are all as motherf---ing glorious as the first, and I can feel the touch of my friends.”
As Sinker recounts in a recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum, mere hours after he created the account he had already acquired over 500 followers. As word spread about this fiery faux Emanuel, Sinker’s account eventually reached close to 50,000 followers. Throughout the campaign, @MayorEmanuel was the unrestrained id of the future mayor’s verified account, @RahmEmanuel.
But as Sinker reflects in his PDF talk, @MayorEmanuel became more than the standard Twitter parody account. As Sinker posted his take on the real Rahm Emanuel’s unaired grievances and daily annoyances, he realized that @MayorEmanuel had the potential to become a self-contained story.
Joined by companions David Axelrod and Carl the Intern, as well as dog Hambone and mustachioed duck Quaxelrod, @MayorEmanuel tweeted stories from the campaign trail with his usual verbal flair. Sinker developed his characters and placed them in situations that loosely related to the real Emanuel’s campaign stops, slowly building a narrative that culminated in a science fiction ending. Emanuel wins the election, but as Alexis Madrigal notes, “He gets stuck in the sewers underneath City Hall and kidnapped by current Mayor Richard M. Daley. During that last adventure, he realizes that two Mayor Emanuels can't coexist and goes through a time vortex, ending the story (for now).”
Madrigal is the senior editor at The Atlantic who first broke the story of Sinker’s identity. In his February profile of Sinker, he writes:
The profane, brilliant stream of tweets not only may be the most entertaining feed ever created, but it pushed the boundaries of the medium, making Twitter feel less like a humble platform for updating your status and more like a place where literature could happen. Never deviating too far from the reality of the race itself, @MayorEmanuel wove deep, hilarious stories. It was next-level digital political satire and caricature, but over the months the account ran, it became much more. By the end, the stream resembled an epic, allusive ode to the city of Chicago itself, yearning and lyrical.
Sinker’s @MayorEmanuel introduced thousands of people to the future of real-time political satire. Within minutes, @RahmEmanuel’s actual gaffes and presumed gripes became fodder for @MayorEmanuel’s expletive-laden outrage.
As a forum for new types of literary work, Twitter’s greatest asset is its ability to capture a story in real-time. But this extraordinary feature may also hinder Twitter’s reputation as a source of legitimate literature. Real-time narratives are entirely concrete: they are connected to specific places and moments in time, and they do not reveal a historical legacy easily. This can make it difficult to determine the value of literary Twitter writing.
One method, however, remains a sure indicator of lasting importance. Luc Sante’s @novelsin3lines tweets were taken from his own published anthology of Fénéon’s century-old articles, and Dan Sinker’s @MayorEmanuel tweets will be published as a book in September.
Recognizing the book behind the tweets, or the book that comes from the tweets, may take the novelty out of the Twitter novel, but it’s the way we give value to literary endeavors in a digital world dominated by its material artifacts.