Twitter has already made a mark in the literary world, through experiments like Jennifer Egan's tweet-by-tweet New Yorker story, “Black Box,†and Ben Okri's line-a-day poem - not to mention the continuing debate over whether the microblogging service has turned the once-contentious literary world into a boring mutual appreciation society.
But now partisans of twitterature have their own official international pow-wow, thanks to the five-day Twitter Fiction Festival, which began Wednesday under the hashtag #twitterfiction.
The participants, some two dozen published and neophyte authors from five continents chosen by a panel of American publishing insiders, will be posting in five different languages, often with input solicited from readers. The Iowa-based writer Jennifer Wilson is posting photographs of gravestones and then writing “flash-fiction†in response to epitaphs submitted by followers. The South African author Lauren Beukes is writing mashups, gathered under the hashtag #LitMash, based on “incongruous suggestions (the weirder the better!),†according to the festival's showcase page. The French fantasy novelist Fabrice Colin will write a serialized story of five strangers trapped on a bus. And an anonymous Chinese author is contributing “Censortive,†a story exploring the limits of free speech in the People's Republic, tweeted out in a series of late-night installments.
The festival will also have a nonvirtual component, with a live event on Saturday at the New York Public Library featuring several participants, including the writer Andrew Schaffer, who is contributing paranormal domestic comedy under the handle @ProudZombieMom.
