Creation through limitation is a concept that has long been familiar to writers.
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We see it through the persistent use of ancient poetic forms such as haiku, as well as the experiments of the Oulipo???a French-speaking writers? circle that can count Italo Calvino as an alumnus???in the 1960s. We still see it in many novels? exploitation of genre conventions, and, according to Robert McCrum?s latest article in The Guardian, we also see it in the brevity enforced by microfiction and flashfiction competitions.
However, one increasingly pressing question is being asked by today?s twitterati: is this brevity, which has long been practiced???and which Shakespeare famously argues is the soul of wit???now being imposed upon writers by Twitter?
McCrum?s argument is that Twitter is changing literature. He writes of self imposed concision: ?In the age of Twitter, such an innovative approach to narrative is peculiarly suggestive and potentially addictive.? Its hard to disagree.
We all know Hemingway?s six word story????For sale: baby?s shoes, never worn????and we?ve even had short stories that, aside from their titles, contain no words at all. Dave Eggers? "There Are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself," take a bow. What, then, is to stop a 140 character tweet from being the latest narrative medium for writers everywhere?
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New York based tweeter Teju Cole???photographer, flaneur and author of the brilliant ?Open City????is just one established writer who uses his Twitter account creatively, tweeting snippets of prose that often deal with the state of life in his native Nigeria. For example: ?Lagos police arrested 33 people for using the wrong preposition: apparently, riding in a train is fine, but riding on a train isn?t.? He has also tweeted his own views on the site?s literary advantages: ?Twitter is unbeatable for aphorism, great for anecdote, decent for poetry, useless for analysis, and the eye of the newt for surrealism.?
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Of course, the idea of Twitter?s use as a medium for literature has its critics, and high profile ones at that. Jonathan Franzen has called the site ?unspeakably irritating? and in one attack described tweeting as ?like writing a novel without using the letter P.? What Franzen makes of Georges Perec?s novel ?La Disparition,? which is over a hundred 300 pages long and is written without once using the letter E, has not been documented.
There are some, however, who would argue that while it will limit fiction, Twitter is a more natural fit for poetry. It is easy to see why poets might be drawn to the medium: It affords the same sense of distillation that is the essence of much poetry; publication, and sometimes appreciation, is only a click away.
Some poets see Twitter as more than a simple form???it can even serve as a source for inspiration. The recently established blog Bad Robot Poetry?publishes poetry influenced by Twitter, as well as by Facebook and the cult of the "meme."?
Whether as a facilitator or an inspiration, it seems that Twitter is insinuating itself into the world of literary creation. The format may be new but the principle is as old as writing itself ???that creativity is often borne of constraint. It?s early days, but the time may come when the mentioning of 140 characters will remind bookworms of more than just the cast list of a Tolstoy novel.
(Photo: Alexander Nazaryan)
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