Twitter’s staccato bursts always give the impression of being spontaneous, no matter how well plotted-out or scheduled in advance. It’s their brevity, coupled with a lack of adjectives, I guess, along with the impluse-friendly format. Dan Baum’s tweeting the story of his New Yorker hiring and firing over a few days last May felt a bit like guerilla journalism, even if was crafted down to the last ampersand.
But tomorrow morning Rick Moody will begin tweeting a short story, “Some Contemporary Characters.” Brought to you by the always innovative guys at Electric Literature, this is not flash fiction, or a serialized public domain novel; no extemporaneous jamming here. It’s 100% purposeful, made up of 153 tweets sent out every ten minutes for the next three days. Electric Literature‘s Andy Hunter says:
In a lot of ways Rick is the perfect writer to take on the project of writing a story specifically for Twitter. He’s a great storyteller who has often set formal constraints for himself in the past, particularly in his short fiction.… In a way, the Twitter story helps to highlight the extreme attention to language a great short story writer is likely to pay.
I’m interested to see how a carefully crafted short story rubs up against the general ADD of Twitter, and I’ll be reading along. You can follow their feed whether you’re a Twitter user or not.
The 21st century version of the serialized book.
In reply to how he liked the new Astro Turf that was replacing natural grass on the baseball field in the late 60s, former Phillies slugger Richie Allen said, “If a horse can’t eat it I don’t want to play on it.”
Well, if I can’t hold it in my hands, I don’t want to read it.
Now get the hell of my lawn!
My MFA adviser!