As you can see, there is quite a bit of things included in Twitterature. Some even say fan accounts that tweet from the perspective of fictional characters count as part of the genre. The possibilities are endless! The account @veryshortstory, for example, has been Tweeting out one-tweet fiction since 2009, and many users have taken the #vss (very short story) to share their own attempts at the medium. @sixwords Tweets out six-word memoirs, occasionally compiling them into books. They’re on their 10th book of six-word memoirs now and show no signs of stopping. According to their website, over 5,000 teachers have used the format as an exercise in their classrooms. If you want to try your hand at a six-word memoir, you can submit to them, too! Same as yesterday. She moaned and snapped the lid shut. “Why does she make so much thanksgiving?” Beni said “I’ll trade you” holding out a candy bar and bag of chips. Ella took the trade knowing his mother couldn’t cook. — Very Short Story (@VeryShortStory) November 30, 2021 Another author, @arjunbasu, had one of his “Twisters”, what he calls his 140-character stories, turned into a short film in 2009! Here’s another of his Twisters: — Arjun Basu (@arjunbasu) April 6, 2013 Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, took to Twitter to share the story of his house’s resident fly he named Jeffrey. At first, he was just Tweeting about what the real-life fly was doing, but after the fly disappeared, Pullman wrote an obituary. Fans of Jeffrey, however, were saddened by his loss, so Pullman “brought him back to life.” Thus began the fictional life of Jeffrey the fly. — Philip Pullman (@PhilipPullman) November 14, 2013 Teju Cole, author of Open City and Every Day is for the Thief, created a short story called “Hafiz” out of retweeting other’s posts. In isolation, the Tweets weren’t connected, posted by different people at different times, but Cole’s retweeting them in a specific order created a narrative! — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) October 13, 2009 David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, also tried his hand at Tweeting out a short story. “The Right Sort” was published in bursts of Tweets. They were later compiled into a collection of Tweets by @SceptreBooks where you can still read the story in chronological order. — Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@AyeshaASiddiqi) January 8, 2014 — David Mitchell (@david_mitchell) July 14, 2014 The first Twitter novels, both Tweeted in 2007 and 2008, are said to be Small Places by Nicholas Belardes and The Good Captain by Jay Bushman. Small Places took two years to complete, landing at around 30,000 words in total as Belardes told the story of mundane, corporate life of a man in California. The Good Captain, a sci-fi retelling of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” was originally tweeted from November 2007 through February 2008 and was then compiled into an ebook. Other authors like Jennifer Egan and her story Black Box, Bob Blechman’s Executive Severance, and Matt Richtel’s “Twiller” used the platform to share their longer fiction, a few sentences at a time. — smallplaces (@smallplaces) April 26, 2008 Chindu Sreedharan of the account @epicretold, retold The Mahabharata over the span of more than 2,000 tweets and 1.8 million words over the span of a few years! The retelling was later published as Epic Retold: The Mahabharata in Tweets. Romeo and Juliet, too, got the “Twitter treatment” when the Royal Shakespeare Company shared a retelling of the classic story over the span of 4,000 tweets in 2010. Others have taken to Twitter to tweet the Exodus, add a fictional spin to classic stories, or put modern slang where it’s never been before. — Juliet (@julietcap16) April 11, 2010 Others with their own take on the premise include @mythologybot, @poem.exe, and @happyendingbot to name a few. — Magic Realism Bot (@MagicRealismBot) May 24, 2022 If you’re interested in other niche genres of literature, check out this guide to digital literature or this exploration of horror sub-genres.
