After reading “Black Box” and “Staggered transmissions: Twitter and the return of serialized literature,” I have been reflecting on how the writing process behind Twitter novels differs from the more “traditional” writing process that leads to novels. As Andersen points out, every installment of “Black Box” must be able to stand on its own, since there is a delay between the publication of each tweet, but it must also dialog with the other parts. Unlike most books, in which sentences function as the building blocks of some larger structure, pieces of Twitter novels must be self-contained and simultaneously leave room for live engagement from the broader audience, whose members thus become co-authors of the novel. As a soon-to-be Twitter novelist, I am still thinking through what the writing process for these pieces might look like. While I understand they cannot be mere 140-character-sized installments of a larger novel, I do not know how else to go about writing them. I am also unsure of how to balance self-containment with openness to voices from the audience, or how to bring in this engagement from other Twitter users in the first place. I hope we can discuss this more on Monday!
One Reply to “Reflections on seriality”
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Definitely! It’s great to see you bring questions to our session. Audience management is a key component of Twitter (and any medium): whether you want to encourage others to contribute to your work determines some strategies for writing. Will you @ people, for example? Will you reply to people? If you’re creating a multiple-character piece with several Twitter handles, who will manage the individual handles? These are some of the questions that can help you think through how you’ll organize your work.