Author of 'The Ice Storm' tries storytelling on Twitter

Rick Moody, the author of "The Ice Storm," is publishing a short story on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Moody took up the challenge when it was suggested by the innovative new magazine Electric Literature, which is publishing "Some Contemporary Characters" simultaneously with about 20 others, including L.A. bookstores Vroman's and Skylight and CalArts' literary magazine Black Clock.

The story is being tweeted in 10-minute intervals by @ElectricLit and the others between now and Wednesday, taking breaks at night. 

So far, it looks to be a story about a budding relationship between a forty- to fiftysomething man and a woman less than half his age -- hey, it works for Philip Roth -- Internet daters who meet cute. The story has been told, in its first installments, in what are nominally alternating tweets from the perspective of each character. 

It's interesting that a writer of Moody's caliber is willing to give Twitter a try. But at this early stage, the experiment shows where form and content aren't yet matched to their best advantage.

If Moody wrote the story from two individual points of view -- possibly more, as the story is called "Some Contemporary Characters" -- why tweet from a single feed? If the story had an omniscient voice, a godlike storyteller narrating the events, the single feed would make sense. But if these are supposed to be the tweets/thoughts of different people, why not fully exploit the form and bring them each into being on Twitter for the life of the story?

And the simultaneous publishing by 20 different Twitterers is perhaps a miscalculation. In the past, having bookstores, bloggers and other magazines simultaneously pass out a short story would widen the circulation. Today, many of those people are in overlapping social networking circles, and the result is repetition rather than reach. Anyone following more than one of the outlets sees exactly the same tweet show up at exactly the same time from multiple sources. Twitter has a viral recirculation tool -- retweeting, or an RT in a post -- which is organic and feels like a shared secret. But this project isn't using retweeting, it's simply sending out the same broadcast from many places at once -- leaving the receiver to feel like he or she has been attacked by clones. No fun.

What role Twitter eventually will take in our culture -- other than short-attention-span distraction -- is hard to predict. But surely it is a possible venue for telling short stories, and Electric Literature is to be commended for splashing in with this one. But it shows that Twitter as a storytelling form hasn't been fully exploited -- yet.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Rick Moody in 2001. Credit: Jeff Geissler / Associated Press

Comments

[cecil]

I agree. It's a bit disconcerting to get the tweets a few times in repetition. It makes me glaze over and a bit harder to follow the narrative, which is already hard to follow.

I know that Mexican writer Alberto Chimal, http://www.lashistorias.com.mx/ with whom I was on a panel with at the Calgary Book Festival last year was talking about he and a bunch of others in Mexico doing twitter experiments. I wonder how those went / worked.

[Andy Hunter]

The issue with using 2 different, unique feeds to represent each character is the difficulty of getting that information out to followers. A story published in that way would be interesting, but it would be read by far fewer people - you'd have to be really in the know, the story would never be happened upon, and it could never be read it its entirety. Because the story is two parallel narratives, not a dialogue, we couldn't use 'reply' as a means of stitching it together.

There are many users who subscribe to more than one of the copublisher's feeds, and will see each tweet repeated. But through the copublishers, the story is reaching over 10,000 more people. Surely that is more reach than repetition.

[The Wandering Chicken]

Moody and @ElectricLit should have created a "list" like @ElectricLit/SomeContemporaryCharacters. That way he could have created profiles for the two characters and included them in the list. Would've been easier to follow. Also could've allowed for introduction of other characters with @replies. Although I'd say ultimately the biggest problem is that it's kind of dull anyway.

[Matthew]

I like what John Wray has been doing: he took a deleted character from his latest novel, "Lowboy," and Twitters his adventures around the city. They're goofy little entries, a nice companion piece to the actual novel.

[Kellie]

Today, many of those people are in overlapping social networking circles, and the result is repetition rather than reach.

Agreed. The incestuous nature of many Twitter followings was not taken into consideration. If you're following one journal, for example, odds are pretty good that you're following others that are similar. Thus many of the people most likely interested in reading the story (as suggested by the fact that they were already following those certain journals, writers, etc., that are co-publishing) are also the ones most likely getting spammed by the repetition of it. Take a look at the screenshot posted by Ryan Call at HTML Giant: http://htmlgiant.com/?p=19819 , then multiply that by each individual story tweet. For three days. The story's dissemination was not meant as spam, of course -- by no means do I wish to suggest that -- but spam is how it reads on many individual's feeds.

Were the co-publishers more diverse in nature, such overlap would be much less of an issue. But as it stands, I must wonder whether editor Andy Hunter's 10k estimate above is a true audience count or rather the simple sum of all co-publisher's followings including the percentage of users that appear on multiple lists. (I myself would appear four times if that is the case.) Even with that it mind, I agree with Mr. Hunter it likely would, indeed, be more reach than repetition, but I think it is also more alienating of those who were most likely to read -- and spread -- the story in the first place.

I like the experiment of Mood's story (even if I too think the single feed of multiple voices fails to consider how Twitter works/is read), and I like ElectricLit: it's a good journal based on a number of philosophies and methods that I applaud, and I give them props for trying new things. But this new thing in particular has made Twitter less useful to me, so I've unfollowed EL and all other co-publishers until Moody's story is over and the signal to noise ratio improves again. I look forward to refollowing them on Thursday and seeing what they do next.

[tien.]

Excellent point re: John Wray's deleted character's Twittering advetures - this is where I see the overlap between literature and Twitter-ature. It's sort of like mini-webisodes that Battlestar Galactica, among other series, put together between seasons. These are great little productions that enhance the story and characters, but are not necessarily required to follow the basic plot.

The Electric Lit novel-by-Twitter project was interesting on paper, but execution was a total fail. In addition to the massive repetition problem, there also was a problem of cohesion: the novel's tweets were, of course, constantly interrupted by other tweets from others you followed. Overall, quite an annoying tweet assault on users.

[mikeohara]

I'm undoubtedly a Luddite, but it sounds like a pointless experiment. Plus, it's unworkable for bedtime reading.