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Tired of reading, writing or trying to gain a better understanding of the world, but still want to call yourself a literary buff? Well, today may be your lucky day, thanks to Twitter fiction. That's right, just like everything else in 21st century society, fiction now comes in 140-character Twitter form! Take this 2008 great from the page 'Twitterfiction.'
"Half a million refugees packed into tents. Stories so harrowing he had run out of tears. These people had witnessed humanity's darkest side."
See the heartbreak, the utter despair? No? Well how about a little comedy from Arjun Basu's Twitter?
"He sees an ancient Chinese lady walking around in bright yellow Crocs. 'Globalization is wrong,' he says. 'Then give me your taco,' she replies."
Still falling flat? Well, that's probably because a Twitter fiction is - wait for it-only 140-characters. Twitter may be a cool way to list headlines from news sources and places of interest.
It is even an expectable way for narcissists to list the reasons why they are so awesome or about their great new shirt.
Heck, it's even a decent way for people to send dumb messages to each other once they get tired of flipping through Facebook pages four hours a day. But creating literary works?
OK, lets trace this back through (a poorly retold) history.
First, we have Homer telling his stories about a bunch of Greeks running around with Trojan horses and turning into pigs. Sure, they took three weeks to tell and years to comprehend, but everybody loves a good Trojan-pigs-fighting-Achilles story!
Then, we have Shakespeare, whose plays usually involved everybody dying and/or killing each other. Again, literature.
Then we have Dickens … lets not go into Dickens. Nobody has ever actually finished a Dickens book, so I couldn't tell you what they are about.
If I were any kind of literary scholar and historian (I'm not), I would say this is the breaking point. Dickens's wordy and overwrought prose made something inside our collective literary conscience snapp, and we decided one day it would be all right to write 140 character stories.
All right, now that I have every literature enthusiast and fellow English major calling hits on me, maybe I can get a point across.
Call two-sentence musings what you want, but they aren't works of literature. Long-form Twitter stories are even more confusing - why not just put them together?
At the very best, Twitter fiction is the beginnings of something bigger and better. So please, don't litter your Twitter pages with two-sentence stories. Tweet-novelists may think that they are worth their time, but I have a 140-character story for them.
Itweeted a story to my mother. "How do you like it, mommy?" I asked. "Its time to take your ADHD pills," she said as she unfollowed my page.
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