Doyce gets interviewed (first of three parts) on how he’s Twittering a story.
First, the format of the story is something like a first-person private journal, so the language itself is terse, but it’s more than that: the constraints of the Twitter format (140 characters, and my own desire not to use any abbreviations or truncated words) require that you encapsulate far more action into a single post than you ever would in 140 characters using the typical style of storytelling found in a novel.
In part, that’s kind of encapsulation is necessary to keep the story moving at an enjoyable pace – it would take something like 25 twitter posts to get one page of a normal novel out, and each of those individual posts would be pretty boring… and people would hate you for spamming them like that – overall, not really the response I’m going for. So no: not a novel-via-twitter.
At some level, it’s obviously an experiment – to a degree, it feels like I’m writing one panel of a graphic novel every post, and in a lot of ways there’s a similarity between what I’m doing and any other kind of sequential story telling. I call it ‘serial micro-fiction’ for a reason: the old serial adventure stories always ended with a cliffhanger and I try to do something that with each post – leave the story on an “ooh, and then what happens?” note.
I’ve been following the tale along, and while it’s sort of like strobing frames of a movie (only in 140 bytes of text increments), it’s pretty darn keen. And the interview is a nice summation of some of the conversations Doyce has been having about the publishing industry and how it’s evolving (at least the parts of it that are going to survive).