Radical experiments in fiction -- on Twitter
With the first Twitter Fiction Festival, the microblogging service is aiming to showcase the world's most innovative approaches to storytelling. The festival begins November 28.
Twitter may still be thought of as a place where people share what they ate for breakfast or pictures of their cats, but some think of it as a home for serious storytelling.
Already some have used the microblogging service as a home for innovative fiction projects, including Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" and a creative use of a faux-"Mad Men" narrative.
With that in mind, the company today announced the first Twitter Fiction Festival, a five-day event starting November 28 that will showcase "creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world."
Starting today, prospective participants can submit their ideas for how Twitter can be used as a platform for fiction. "Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter -- short story in tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting-- or, even better, how you'll create a new one," Twitter wrote on its blog today. "How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment? The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival -- but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour."
Twitter said it will announce the authors, as well as the festival's agenda, on November 19.