To cut a long story short: #Twitter Fiction

Twitter is a great resource for writers. It can provide a stream of links to useful web pages. It can also help writers to keep in touch with editors, publishers or other writers. You may not know, however, that Twitter can also be used to publish fiction directly. This may seem unlikely, given the 140 character limit of a tweet, but many people use it for precisely this.

In fact, writing very short fiction is not a new development. Ernest Hemingway, for example, once wrote the following six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This would fit into a tweet four times over. Hemingway reportedly said that it was the finest prose he had ever written.

But writing such short fiction is by no means easy. Each word has to be placed with the utmost care. Often, the trick is to leave much of the story out. You just imply it; readers have to fill in the details for themselves. There is no time for scene-setting. You need to catch the key moment of the story. Not this: “He sat and prepared the contents of his briefcase for a full ten minutes before he grasped it and felt ready to finally step a foot outside his flat.” Rather: “Briefcase in hand, he left.”

The Guardian asked famous novelists to write a complete story in 140 characters. This challenge has produced some touching, funny, surprising and very tweetable stories:

Take the surprising twist that happens at the end of Geoff Dyer’s piece:

“I know I said that if I lived to 100 I’d not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.”

Or the gruesome finale in Ian Rankin’s story:

“I opened the door to our flat and you were standing there, cleaver raised. Somehow you’d found out about the photos. My jaw hit the floor.”

Or the end of a relationship in James Meek’s tweet:

He said he was leaving her. "But I love you," she said. "I know," he said. "Thanks. It's what gave me the strength to love somebody else."

Is twitterature a step forward or a step back? Will any of these stories become classics? It’s too early to tell, but with everything, including storytelling, becoming smaller, shorter and faster, twitterature is here to stay. Just sign in to Twitter and search #twitterature, #140novel, #sixwordstories, #twitterfiction and see how 140-character novels are gaining popularity.