Twitter As a Conduit For Fiction?

twittories.jpgLast week we ran a story on figures out of Japan where half of the top ten selling works of fiction are written on mobile phones; people (not surprisingly) thought this was rather odd, but sales figures don’t lie. A new project founded by The Podcast Network CEO Cameron Reilly, Twittories, is aiming to see whether Twitter can be use to create fiction.

To quote Cameron on the idea:

My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story – 140 characters at a time.

The idea is that each Twittory will last for 140 entries and each entry can be a maximum of 140 characters. Twittory #1 “The Darkness Inside”, commenced yesterday with 140 participants starting to contribute 140 characters each, with the end goal being a 19600 character short story. The story as it evolves can be read here.

Cameron doesn’t think that this is an evolutionary step forward in the development of fiction, but an interesting experiment in mashing crowd based contributions via Twitter. If you can become a best selling author by writing something on a mobile phone, maybe this idea may evolve into something with a future.

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