Tweet-writing fan

Amazing what you can do on Twitter. Having recently published an Austen-inspired murder mystery, I’ve made a huge number of Austen-interested friends on Twitter, and back at the end of last year @AdamSpunberg and I came up with the idea of inviting people to collaborate on writing a whole new Austenesque story, 140 characters at a time.

Sounds crazy? Well yes and no. Yes, because we had no idea whether anyone would actually want to join in, and what the output would look like; but no, because we ended up with over 50 people taking part every week from 13 countries. Everyone took a 15 minute slot, and having set up a very loose opening scenario we let the team decide where the story went.

The whole thing turned out to be the most amazing fun – not only did we end up with over 100,000 words of story, but many of the people who took part said they’d become far more confident about their writing as a result – you could actually see that happening as each week went by. That was the nicest unexpected consequence, at least from my point of view, but there were other things I didn’t expect too.

We all know that reading on a PC screen is different from reading on a book (or an e-book reader for that matter) – it’s that whole thing about the difference between ‘sitting up’ and ‘sitting back’. But the Twitter Austen project brought a whole new dimension to reading online. To sit and watch the tweets as they rolled by was a genuinely unique experience, because you knew the writing and the reading were taking place almost simultaneously. You also knew who was tweeting, so that was another extra dimension – you were ‘reading’ the author’s personality as well as the story’s plot and characters.

Another intriguing thing – for me at least – was that reading the same tweets later, either on-screen or on a print-out, was a different experience again. Once the text was laid out in a conventional page format, with the tweeters’ names removed, there definitely wasn’t the same level of energy. That was only to be expected of course, but it also seemed that as soon as it looked more formal and ‘normal’, your brain was conditioned to assess it differently: you started to read it as you would a traditional book. The wit was still there, the humour was still there, and the moments of genuine emotion were still there, but the little discrepancies in things like timing or location suddenly became more obvious, as did the inconsistencies of style you were always going to get with anything written at speed by such a huge range of writers.

The point is, did any of that matter? Not to me anyway – I was far more interested in celebrating what the project did, than worrying about what it didn’t do – and was never meant to do. All the same, it’s quite entertaining to speculate whether this wasn’t one of the first examples of a very new hybrid creature – a story that actually has to be read in real-time, and which loses a lot of its special quality almost immediately if you try to transfer it to a more permanent or traditional reading medium.

Switching hats and looking at it from the point of view of being one of the writers, the challenges – and delights – started with the obvious fact that it was a collaboration. You didn’t own the characters, you didn’t know where the plot was going, or (more to the point) what was going to happen in the slots immediately preceding yours, so you couldn’t plan ahead or write anything in advance. Writing ‘on the hoof’ like that is incredibly demanding – we all had the odd hairy moment, I can tell you – but everyone grew to love and exploit the ‘handover moment’, when you set up the next writer with a cliff-hanger or a mystery, or just a very Austenesque moment of wicked irony.

So there you are – my thoughts on a fascinating and hugely rewarding experiment. And if you missed it the first time round and wish you could have taken part, there’ll be another version of the same idea sometime later this year. So keep an eye on Twitter!

This post originally appeared on June 8th at
http://meandmybigmouth.typepad.com/scottpack/2011/06/guest-blogger-lynn-shepherd.html