Discussion → Short Story Now

  • Hedge.thumb
    A
    Oct 06, 04:07pm

    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?


  • Nathaniel%20tower.thumb
    Nathaniel Tower
    Oct 06, 09:39pm

    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.


  • 4586_550127587839_9801266_32663791_2858639_n.thumb
    Ben White
    Oct 15, 07:28pm

    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.


  • 435.thumb
    Travis Kurowski
    Oct 24, 12:36pm

    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.



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