Twitter Fiction In today’s lecture, I’d like to talk about telling stories

Twitter Fiction
   Good morning, everyone. In today’s lecture, I’d like to talk about telling stories online. So in my free time outside of Twitter, I experiment a little bit with telling stories online, experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools. And in my job at Twitter, I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well, helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with. And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
   But first, I want to start and go back to the 1930s. Long before a little thing called Twitter, radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast. And from those single points emanated stories. Some of them were familiar stories. Some of them were new stories. And for a while they were familiar formats, but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium. Think about episodes that happened live on radio. Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction, you get this new format. And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories.
   Today, we have an entirely new medium to play with, which is this online world. There are thousands upon thousands of Twitter users. Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster. We’ve gone to this world of many to many, where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting. And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium. I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we’ve explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it, and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create. I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods.
   The short story, for example, people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers, digital marketplaces. Here I would like to cite some examples of this new type of fiction. This is an example of short story by the author Jennifer Egan called "Black Box". Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created. Egan wrote each individual tweet manually in the storyboard sketchbook and those tweets ended up becoming over 600 of them. Then they were serialized by The New Yorker. Every night, at 8 p.m., you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker’s fiction account. I think that’s pretty exciting and it can be called "tune-in literary fiction". The experience of Egan’s story, of course, like anything on Twitter, there were multiple ways to experience it. You could scroll back through it, but interestingly, if you were watching it live, there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets were coming at a pretty regular clip, but in this case, The New Yorker was sending you bit by bit, and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line.
   Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter, Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called "Evidence". It began with this tweet: "On November 28 at 10:13 p.m., a woman identified as Miranda Brown, 44, of Brooklyn, fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel." It begins in Elliott’s voice, but then Elliott’s voice recedes, and we hear the voices of Elsa, Margot and Simon, characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story, a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 10:13 p.m. when this woman falls to her death. These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives. Elliott captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time. Interestingly, though, it wasn’t just Twitter as a distribution mechanism. It was also Twitter as a production mechanism. Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs. She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line, line by line. So through this format she had created multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter.
   As you begin to play with flexible identity online, it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world. All of these are rapid iterations on a theme. They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium. You look at something like "West Wing" Twitter, in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world. They comment on politics, they cry out against the evils of Congress. Keep in mind, they’re all Democrats.
   As a conclusion, with real-time storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the real world and the digital world, flexible identity, anonymity, these are all tools that we have accessible to us, and I think that they’re just the building blocks. They are the bits that we use to create the structures, the frames. That then would become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation.