Twitterature (a
portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of words[Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...](_blank)
'' and ''
literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
'') is a literary use of the
microblogging
Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...
service of
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
. It includes various genres, including
aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tra ...
s,
poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
, and
fiction
Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditi ...
(or some
combination
In mathematics, a combination is a selection of items from a set that has distinct members, such that the order of selection does not matter (unlike permutations). For example, given three fruits, say an apple, an orange and a pear, there are th ...
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.
Genres
Aphorism
Aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tra ...
s are popular because their brevity is inherently suited to Twitter. People often share well-known classic aphorisms on Twitter, but some also seek to craft and share their own brief insights on every conceivable topic.
Boing Boing
''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won ...
has described Twitter as encouraging "a new age of the aphorism", citing the novel aphorisms of Aaron Haspel.
Poetry
Haiku
is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...
are a brief poetic form well suited to Twitter; many examples can be found using the
hashtag
A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...
#haiku. Other forms of poetry can be found under other hashtags or by "following" people who use their Twitter accounts for journals or poetry. For example, the Swedish poet and journalist
Göran Greider
Per Göran Greider (born 1959) is a Swedish social democratic journalist, author and poet. Greider's poetry was first published in 1981.
Greider has been the editor in chief of the provincial newspaper ''Dala-Demokraten'' since 1999. He is a ...
tweets observations and poems using the Twitter handle @GreiderDD (Göran Greider) as shown in the example on the right.
Fiction
Twitterature fiction includes 140-character stories,
fan fiction
Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settin ...
, the retelling of literary classics and legends, twitter novels, and collaborative works. The terms "twiction" and "tweet fic" (Twitter fiction), "twiller" (Twitter thriller), and "phweeting" (fake tweeting) also exist to describe particular twitterature fiction genres.
140-character stories: fiction that fits into a single tweet. 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
Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (born 15 April 1940) is an English novelist, life peer, convicted criminal, and former politician. Before becoming an author, Archer was a Member of Parliament (1969–1974), but did not ...
and
Ian Rankin
Sir Ian James Rankin (born 28 April 1960) is a Scottish crime writer, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels.
Early life
Rankin was born in Cardenden, Fife. His father, James, owned a grocery shop, and his mother, Isobel, worked in a schoo ...
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
Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settin ...
.
Literary classics and legends
Literary classics and legends are retold on Twitter, either by characters' tweeting and interacting, or by retelling in tweet format, often in modern language using slang. For instance, in 2010, a group of
rabbi
A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi – known as ''semikha'' – following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of ...
s tweeted
the Exodus
The Exodus (Hebrew language, Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, ''Yeẓi’at Miẓrayim'': ) is the founding myth of the Israelites whose narrative is spread over four books of the Torah (or Pentateuch, corresponding to the first five books of the ...
, with the hashtag #TweetTheExodus; and in 2011, the
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs over 1,000 staff and produces around 20 productions a year. The RSC plays regularly in London, St ...
and the English game company
Mudlark
A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries. The practice of searching the banks of rivers for items cont ...
tweeted the story of ''
Romeo and Juliet
''Romeo and Juliet'' is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetim ...
''.
In 2009,
Alexander Aciman
Alexander Aciman (born 1990) is an American writer and journalist. His work has appeared in ''Tablet Magazine'', ''The New York Times'', '' Vox'', ''The New Republic'', ''The New Yorker'' online, ''Time'' magazine, and ''The Paris Review'' onlin ...
and
Emmett Rensin
Emmett Rensin (born January 20, 1990) is an American essayist and Pundit, political commentator who writes from a Left-wing politics, leftist perspective. Originally from Los Angeles, he currently serves as a contributing editor for the ''Los Angel ...
published ''Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter''.
''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
The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kuruk ...
, into the microblogging site Twitter.” Tweeted from @epicretold, and subsequently published as a full-length book by
HarperCollins India
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Co ...
, 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.
Twitter novels
Twitter novels (or twovels)
are another form of fiction that can extend over hundreds of tweets to tell a longer story.
The author of a Twitter novel is often unknown to the readers, as anonymity creates an air of authenticity. As such, the account name can often be a
pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...
or even a character in the story. Twitter novels can run for months, with one or more tweets daily, whereby context is usually maintained by a unique hashtag. Searching by the corresponding hashtag produces a list of all available tweets in the series. Some serials are posted in short updates that encourage the reader to follow and to speculate on the next installment.
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
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Egan's novel ''A Visit from the Goon Squad'' won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the Presiden ...
'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.
= Collaborative works
=
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon GaimanBorn as Neil Richard Gaiman, with "MacKinnon" added on the occasion of his marriage to Amanda Palmer. ; ( Neil Richard Gaiman; born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, gr ...
coined the term "interactive twovel" for an experiment in involving his Twitter followers in collaborating with him on a novel. This was conducted with
BBC America Audio Books. The first tweet from Gaiman was as shown on the right. Then, he invited his readers to continue the story under the hashtag #bbcawdio.
The result was published as an audiobook under the title ''Hearts, Keys and Puppetry'', with the author given as Neil Gaiman & Twitterverse.
Teju Cole
Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian. He is the author of a novella ''Every Day Is for the Thief'' (2007), a novel ''Open City'' (2011), an essay collection ''Known and Strange Things'' (20 ...
sent lines from his short story "Hafiz" to other Twitter users and then
retweet
Reblogging (or, in Twitter parlance, retweeting) is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
It was first developed by Jonah Peretti ...
ed them to assemble the story.
Weird Twitter
Weird Twitter is a loose genre of
internet humour The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another media to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the tradition ...
dedicated to publication of humorous material on Twitter that is disorganised and hard to explain.
Related to
anti-humour and created primarily by Twitter users who are not professional humourists, Weird Twitter–style jokes may be presented as disorganised thoughts, rather than in a conventional joke format or punctuated sentence structure.
The genre is based around the restriction of Twitter's 280-character (previously 140) message length, requiring jokes to be quite short.
The genre may also include repurposing of overlooked material on the internet, such as parodying posts made by
spambot
A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. Web hosts and website operators have responded by banning spammers, leading to an ongoing struggle betwe ...
s or deliberately amateurish images created in
Paint
Paint is any pigmented liquid, liquefiable, or solid mastic composition that, after application to a substrate in a thin layer, converts to a solid film. It is most commonly used to protect, color, or provide texture. Paint can be made in many ...
.
The ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' has described the genre as "inane" and intended "to subtly mock the site's corporate and mainstream users."
Some sections of Weird Twitter may be dedicated to a certain subculture or worldview, such as
Traditionalist Catholicism
Traditionalist Catholicism is the set of beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, Christian liturgy, liturgical forms, Catholic devotions, devotions, and presentations of Catholic Church, Catholic teaching that existed in the Catholic Church befo ...
.
History
Twitter was launched in the year of 2006, and the first Twitter novels appeared in 2008. The origins of the term ''Twitterature'' are hard to determine, but it was popularized by Aciman and Rensin's book. Since then, the phenomenon has been discussed in the arts and culture sections of several major newspapers.
[
Twitterature has been called a ]literary genre
A literary genre is a category of literature. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or length (especially for fiction). They generally move from more abstract, encompassing classes, which are then further sub-divided i ...
but is more accurately an adaptation of various genres to social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
.[ 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."]
References
Further reading
*Aciman, A., and E. Rensin. 2009. ''Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitte''. Penguin Books.
*
*
Electronic literature
Twitter
Computer-related introductions in 2008
2000s neologisms
Weird Twitter
{{twitter navbox
Short story types