“Do you read?“ Naah, I don’t. When I open a book, I am reminded of what great Mozart was told after he delivered his first opera. And books, to me, have too many words.

On the microblogging network Twitter instead, you tell micro-novels with a maximum of 140 characters. Do one need more for a quick head-tickling? Not if you stick to what you’ve learnt in literature classes. There, we were told that a good essay consists of an exposition, a main part, and an ending. Published on Twitter, these self-contained TinyTales however only consist of an ending.

„A wave of adrenalin flooded his brain. Checkmate. He had beaten Kasparow. A human. He blinked, satisfied.“

Under twitter.com/tinytales, you find some mini-novels, written by an unknown author. On the other hand, Florian Meimberg from Düsseldorf regulary updates his Twitter-account with macrostories in German language. He is quit a success in the national Twittersphere and counts 3674 followers.

While tweets are technically limited to a maximum of 140 characters, they aren’t in pun, or humor. First and foremost, they contain saucy allusions on historical events or film plots. But: they are not a phenomenon of modern days. There is one Tiny Tale, coming from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. It goes like this: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.“ Six letters, neither more nor less. The author’s name is Hemingway.

In 2006, the Wired magazine called for entries for a Very Short Stories Contest. There, they combined ultra short stories and graphic design. Dozens of authors put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Here you can find the stories which havent’t been published in the printed issue of Wired.

And it was may 2008, when the Copyblogger Blog was holding the Twitter Writing Contest. They were asking: Can you tell a story in exactly 140 characters? Find every single entry listed as a comment at the end of the article.

New York Times’ editor Matt Reichel even wrote it out completely. He promoted the idea of a whole (big) Twitter-novel in his article “Introducing the Twiller“:

“It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cellphone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.”

Ain’t that a hot topic!? I am so fascinated of how everything has to be concentrated to fit into a Tiny Tale. A story, cracked superficially with just a few words. Reaching the end of a sentence, you feel helpless for a sec. The rest of the story then is just fabricated in our minds, by itself. Moreover, to write a story with 140 characters seems to be as hard as writing something on four pages. Or what do you think?

PS: You’re totally into Twitter? Add me on Twitter or Facebook!

Photo typewriter: Easystreet

31. December 2009

Sven Wiesner

Tags
Microblogging | TinyTale | Twitter


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