Neil Gaiman writing short story on Twitter – with a big twist!
Science fiction and fantasy author Neil Gaiman is going to write a short story using Twitter. To be more precise, his going to write the first 140 characters of a short story, then let other Twitterers write the rest of the story. The crowd-sourced piece of fiction, once complete, will be compiled by BBC Audiobooks and will be made available on the BBC Audiobooks website as well as iTunes as a free download.
According to this Publishers Weekly article where I first read about Gaiman’s plans, the Twitter short story will begin tomorrow October 13. If you’re interested in a possible contribution to a famous author’s work, you can follow Gaiman on Twitter and write your 140 character contribution to his newest endeavor. You’ll be in crowded company, though, because Gaiman has well over 1 million followers!
In theory this sounds like a great idea. However, there are risks. As this Entertainment Weekly article points out, the story could be thrown into a garbage bin of bad tweets that don’t follow any sort of narrative:
It’ll be interesting to see if average Twitterzens will be able to maintain a functioning narrative in this mass game of exquisite corpse, or if it will inevitably devolve into “And then a comet hit the planet and everybody died!” or “A giant poo-monster came out of nowhere and swallowed dear Esmeralda whole,” as mine always did.
With the world of Twitter so crowded, and Gaiman’s huge fanbase, I can see this easily turning into a complete disaster. Or, it will take a great deal of editing to turn all those tweets into a cohesive narrative. The latter is almost guaranteed. Either way the whole experiment will be entertaining.
Other people have written stories on Twitter and a few have even tried what Gaiman is doing. Though Neil Gaiman is a much bigger name in the book world, so his experiment will garner much more attention and will be followed more closely. I love this kind of innovative experimentation because no one knows when the next big thing will catch on.
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- Is the short story dead?
- Read my guest post on LongShortStories: ‘Resurrecting the Short Story’
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