You Know Who is Great on Twitter?

Walt Whitman.

Adventures in Twitter Fiction

Steven Soderbergh is Writing a Novella...

on Twitter.

Librarians of the Twitterverse

The New York Review of Books discusses the Library of Congress's efforts to collects all the Tweets.

From the story...

Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.

The library has attached itself to the firehose. A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second—tens of thousands at peak times: World Cup matches, presidential elections, Beyonce’s pregnancy—and make their way in “real time” to a company called Gnip, a social-media data provider in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip organizes them into one-hour batches on a secure server for download, where they are counted and checked and finally copied to reels of magnetic tape, to be stored in a couple of filing cabinets. In different locations, for safety. If you have ever tweeted, rest assured that each of your little gems is there for posterity.

Of course, the chance of even your very best tweet being seen again by human eyes is approximately zero.

In Praise of the Hashtag

The New York Times waxes eloquent.

From the story...

In the early days, hashtags were primarily functional — a way of categorizing tweets by topic so that members of the Twittersphere could follow conversations of interest to them by searching for a list of similarly tagged tweets. The first hashtag, proposed by the user Chris Messina, was intended to collate conversations about the tech conference BarCamp, so the hashtag was #barcamp. Other tags in the early days served as straightforward metadata, directing people to tweets about news, events and user interests: #sandiegofires, #roseparade, #education and so on. 

Over time, though, the hashtag has evolved into something else — a form that allows for humor, darkness, wordplay and, yes, even poetry. During this same period, Twitter as a corporation recognized the power of the hashtag, which has now become a part of the site’s design, lingo and sales pitch to advertisers. Your particular hashtag, for example, can let the whole world know who’s talking about the release of #Halo4. 

As a result, we’ve arrived at a strange moment for the hashtag. The people at Twitter are fond of saying that the hashtag is the new URL — and it’s true that you’re just as likely to see the former as the latter these days on-screen at the end of a movie trailer. 

Yet the rise of the hashtag’s commercial possibilities shouldn’t lead us to overlook what is truly remarkable about it. This bit of utilitarian Web ephemera, invented with functionality squarely in mind, has blossomed into a marvelous and underappreciated literary device.

Twitter and Literature - Unlikely Bedfellows

The Guardian looks at the growing convergence between literature and Twitter.

From the piece...

But I'm not convinced that Twitter and literature are natural bedfellows. So far, attempts to marry the two – from gimmicky stocking fillers such as Twitterature to chicklit such as The Twitter Diaries, to the inevitable Bloomsday tweetathon, to dustjackets begging us to "join the conversation", to the hashtag #amreading (no you're not, you're online) – have been uniformly annoying.

I tried to follow Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box", which she live-tweeted via the New Yorker. It was a nice idea, but wholly impractical, especially for someone on British Summer Time. Even Shakespeare would lose its impact read backwards, in 140-character soundbites, between breaking news and apercus from @PiersMorgan.

Twitter Fiction

The Guardian challenged well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – to come up with a story of up to 140 characters.

From the piece... 

Andrew O'Hagan

Clyde stole a lychee and ate it in the shower. Then his brother took a bottle of pills believing character is just a luxury. God. The twins.

AL Kennedy


It's good that you're busy. Not great. Good, though. But the silence, that's hard. I don't know what it means: whether you're OK, if I'm OK.

Jeffrey Archer


"It's a miracle he survived," said the doctor. "It was God's will," said Mrs Schicklgruber. "What will you call him?" "Adolf," she replied.

Is the Literary Recluse a Dying Breed?

Yes. :(

Damn you social media.

From a piece on Lit Reactor...

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960. Since then, Harper Lee has appeared in public a handful of times. She never wrote another book, and she rarely grants interviews. 

In 1951, J.D. Salinger published his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye. As the book grew in popularity, the author withdrew from public, moving from his Manhattan apartment to Cornish, New Hampshire. From there, he published three more books, all without maintaining a public profile.  

Only a few photos of Thomas Pynchon exist, nearly all from high school and college. He's published eight novels, and despite some high-profile "appearances"--like in animated form, as himself on The Simpsons--there's still a great deal of speculation about him.  

These authors, and others, carry an air of mystique that make them bigger than their writing. They leave more questions than they answer: Why didn't Lee finish The Long Goodbye, her second book? How many novels did Salinger write that will never be released? What does Pynchon even look like? 
These are authors we feel like we know, but we never really did.
 
They're also a dying breed--the literary recluse, rendered obsolete by blogging and social networking.

6 @Twitter Rules for #Authors

The Los Angeles Times breaks it down for writers, here.

From the list...


2. Share your process. Twitter is a place where fans get a deeper connection to artists, performers, scholars ... and authors. Your readers are interested in your process. Tweet a bit about how your work. Invite your followers to a local book signing.

3. Engage with your readers. Twitter is also a place where your fans can directly engage with you, however much you want (it doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time). You can see messages from other users in the “Connect” tab on your Twitter homepage. Is there a question in there for you? Answer it.

And don't forget to follow me, here.

Top 50+ Creative Writing Professors on Twitter

The list, care of the Boston Globe.

What Sorts of Bookish Folks Should You Follow on Twitter?

According to Media Bistro, these ones.

Oh, bookish or not, you'd be remiss if you didn't follow the Twitter adventures of Steve Martin.