Twitter’s Fiction Festival!

What do you use Twitter for? For some people – no, a lot of people it seems – Twitter is a venue to promote themselves or their business. For others, Twitter is a way of holding a conversation with themselves, with or without the hopes of having other people chime in. Then there are those people who use Twitter to chat with friends, “real” or virtual.

Twitter Fiction Festival

But, have you ever thought of using Twitter to tell fictional stories? While you might have chuckled at that question and thought about a friend – or two – who is rather good at “telling fictional stories” on Twitter, there is actually a real event revolving around the telling of such stories on the microblogging platform.

The Twitter Fiction Festival

The guys of Twitter themselves announced some time last week that they are holding a Fiction Festival that will run for five days starting on the 28th of November. The Twitter Fiction Festival is basically going to celebrate the art of storytelling – the fictional kind, obviously – via Twitter.

As one who loves to read fiction, I find the whole concept of the Twitter Fiction Festival very exciting. More so, as an aspiring (forever it seems) fiction writer, the challenges that the format presents are both scary and exhilarating at the same time. Some people already struggle with writing cogently on Twitter for “normal” thoughts. It certainly will be a more exacting task to create (and publish!) fiction with the 140-limit in mind.

It is all an experiment, Twitter says, but this is one experiment that could just revolutionize the way we tell stories online and the way we use the platform as well.

If you fancy yourself a fiction writer, you can actually participate in the Twitter Fiction Festival. You only have to fill in the details here. Oh, and it would help if you have an idea about what story you want to tell during the festival. Scratch that – you need to know what you want to tell, and a few more other details. For those of you who merely want to follow the festival and not write, the hashtag to follow is #twitterfiction.

I don’t know about you, but this just made Twitter even more interesting!

[Image via Twitter Blog]