Discussion → Short Story Now
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What about the novel tweet by tweet? Or Kindle & iPhone apps? There are new mediums for engaging popping up every day. Where is the place of the short story in all this?
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I can't even fathom reading a novel of tweets. Of course, I don't even text, so I guess I'm a bit old school.
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There are people who have taken their regular old short stories and tweeted them, 140 characters at a time in seemingly never-ending and basically unreadable torrent. This is to me a gimmick and an unsuccessful one.
What mediums like twitter and smartphones do is demand a smaller cohesive unit of story telling. You can read a long story on Twitter. But you'd want each tweet to actually SAY something, not just be half of a long sentence.
The debate about the internet attention span aside, I do think these compact screens do in part ask writers to make their stories digestible in a new way. But there have always been stories, even longish ones, that are written in dense, fulfilling chunks.
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For the past decade or so the story thanks to the Internet has become shorter and shorter, has tried to accommodate readers within the medium, which seems natural. What the short story has done since Poe, Irving, and etc, it seems.
But, strangely perhaps, this is all not so new. See Kafka's parables and Felix Feneon's three line novels.
Group Description
Electric Literature is a bimonthly anthology of short stories created by writers tired of hearing about how literary fiction is doomed. We often hear that no one reads anymore, and yet everywhere we look we see people reading—whether it be books, blogs, twitters, or text messages. Before we write the epitaph for the literary age, we thought, let’s try it this way first: select stories with a strong voice that capture our readers and lead them somewhere exciting, unexpected, and meaningful. Publish everywhere, every way: paperbacks, Kindles, iPhones, and eBooks. Make it inexpensive and easy to obtain. Pay writers. Be entertaining without sacrificing depth. Create the thing we wished existed.
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.