Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream

It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.

Last week Twitter announced that at the end of November the company will host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

According to Twitter, it has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter notes it has even inspired some literary criticism.

To get into the spirit of things, and without getting into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this tweet-length short short story:

On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the desolated creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.

Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.

Hearing the news that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland that sparked JM Barrie to create Peter Pan, is to be turned into a center for children’s literature got Emily Temple thinking about all the real-life places that have animated works of literature.


Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The rest of the story: 10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics by Emily Temple (Flavorwire 2011-08-06).

As an aside: it would be fun, wouldn’t it, to plan a summer trip to Durham, Maine (the inspiration for Salem’s Lot) and to locales such as the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel), around Stephen King Country: The Illustrated Guide to the Sites and Sights That Inspired the Modern Master of Horror by George W. Beahm. Available from Amazon

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Since 1998, a lifetime in Web years, Literary Traveler has anthologized travel books and essays with artistic ambitions, and arranged literary tours and literary events for readers who like to travel and travelers who like to read.

The many dozens of literary articles and travel profiles by and of famous writers are arrayed alphabetically from Louisa May Alcott to W.B. Yeats. A list of recently added authors, for example, includes Joseph Conrad, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Edward Gorey, Victoria Hislop, Che Guevara, Naguib Mahfouz and Mario Vargas Llosa. A sampling of recent articles -- Of Dreams and Dolls: American Girls and the Spirit of Exploration; Colin McPhee's Musical Life in Bali; Karl Marx's Revolutionary Brussels; Jim Morrison & Lipstick Kisses at Oscar Wilde's Pere-Lachaise; Origins of Crime & Justice in James Patterson's Washington DC; The Real Story Behind Dickens' A Christmas Carol; Shirley Jackson's Outsider Perspective of Bennington, Vermont -- reveals the range of interests explored by the site's contributors.

In the nature of things, most of the familiar names are in the public domain, but so what?; there are endless hours of classic travel writing on the site, including a series on Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway's Places, interviews with well-known writers like Alan Lightman, and links to recommended volumes for purchase.

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