Real-time Fiction: a Guide

S.Cornish: Time Flies 

This is frontier territory; beyond that line of jagged prose there be dragons.

Using tweets to drip feed the narrative directly to the reader is pretty novel. This is a strange and unfamiliar format, even to me.  Follow it as a reader and you catch the story, blink and you’ll have to scroll back to catch up. Twitter isn’t the medium to simply deliver an existing piece of prose fiction line by line, no-one will want to read that. As a writer it takes some planning to write a story that unfolds in real-time, but it doesn’t need to be difficult or intimidating to do.

What makes any story a good story is an interesting premise, strong believable characters and an engaging narrative. Put this across as a succession of tweets that unfold the story in a fictional real-time and you have a temporal tale.
When setting out to write a temporal story there are a few things worth thinking about.

1. Temporal fiction lends itself to the first person, present tense written as if the narrator/character is sending the tweets. 
2. Give it some structure. Like any story, a beginning establishes the characters and setting, the middle moves the story on from the driving incident/motive and the end brings it to a conclusion along with any consequences. 
3. The story will unfold over several hours or days, so try to pace the delivery of tweets to allow the story arc to work with that, making sure interest is maintained even on the days that are leading up to the major bits of drama.
4. In some respects temporal fiction will work more like a film script or radio play than a short written story. It is worth writing a treatment beforehand to help plan how the story will unfold and how long it will take to do so.
5. Making short plot notes also helps as these are already part way to being tweets in their own right.
6. Note down any extra foibles that occur to you about the characters or situation, these can often be worked into the main story arc for additional interest/drama/comedy.
7. Most likely any dialogue will need to be reported, unless it is addressed directly to the reader. But it isn't the only way, be inventive.
8. Suspension of disbelief should be maintained: if the story had been relying on the character sending tweets on their phone and they get tied up: how are they going to be able to send more tweets?
9. Twitter is a restrictive medium; there are only 140 characters for each tweet (both MS Word and Apple Pages will give a useful character count of any chunk of text you select), avoid having to break a segment of story into more than one tweet. But if it can’t be helped then try to use a device like an interruption to make this seem more plausible.
10. Short snappy delivery of the narrative as reports or recounts is easier to write and read.
11. A one day story may need as many tweets as a five day story, try ensuring there is a tweet every few hours to keep the audience interested. 

If you have any other ideas or thoughts on using twitter as a storytelling medium please comment.
These pointers aren’t rules, they are just things learnt from messing round with the format,
an experimental format. With it, anyone can be a ground-breaker and make up the rules as they go along. Go on, surprise us all.


@TemporalTales is looking for story submissions by new or established writers that can be tweeted over a period of one to fourteen days. Please email stories (.doc .txt or .pages format) to:
muse (at) simoncornish.com

(I’ve used (at) instead of @ to defeat the bots. I’m sure you can figure out how to reassemble it). 

Writing Professional or Writing Junkie?

I’m either a clever person who’s being idiotic, or a idiot who’s learnt to show a veneer of cleverness.

Let me qualify that. Here I am, having just finished a Master’s degree in professional writing, I have several irons in the fire: a draft novel, a graphic novel in production, and a whole series of non-fiction role-play books being edited. It all sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? That’s the clever bit, here’s the stupid element: somewhere in my psyche I’ve managed to delude myself that it’s a worthwhile thing to pursue a career as a writer –laughable isn’t it?

An objective individual, with any knowledge of the publishing industry, will immediately understand why it is stupid; statistically I don’t have the proverbial snowball-in-hell’s chance of making anything at all from my writing, let alone turning it into a career. But that is just it, the only way any writer can get anywhere is to delude themselves that it is possible, that the thankless hours spent writing, editing, blogging, promoting, sending out work, and being rejected, are all to some purpose. While it would be wrong to directly compare writing to the appalling, life-wrecking effects of drug and alcohol addiction, the parallels are a little disturbing.
It starts out, often as a teenager, as a recreational thing; it is fun and rewarding, something to fit in with, and be congratulated for doing, by those that appreciate it, and something to be kept a secret from those that do not. Later, it becomes a subtly more obsessive thing; you may be holding down a normal job to earn an income, but you can’t wait to get home and indulge your passion. Soon you find yourself doing it in the morning as well, then you begin to find ways to organise your life around your addiction: flexible hours, self employment, the writing becomes justified as a potential money-spinner to work on between paid projects. Then you move onto more hard-core avenues to pursue the writing dragon: courses and retreats all cost money, and not forgetting the endless supply of books. It all starts to eat into the budget. Eventually the recreational hobby takes over and your income and savings are consumed to write that first novel, the second or third. Relationships become strained as those around you turn from being proudly indulgent to cynically disgusted. You don’t eat properly, your health begins to suffer and your sleep is plagued by flashes of insight; all to serve this writing monster.
And here’s the rub: you convince yourself it is toward some end, that sooner or later it will be worth all the effort, it will take-off and people other than those around you (in drug terminology, they are called enablers) will want to read your work, paying to do so. Surely a form denial every bit is blind as any addict.

Now, where this is all leading I can’t actually say. For habitual substance abusers, the future either leads to spiralling decline, physically, morally and socially, until their wasted shell expires in some ignominious fashion, or through self-will and the intervention of others they get detoxified and undergo a recovery, with the implicit lifetime of abstinence. This perhaps, is where writing differs; it could never be said that it is as toxic or chemically addictive. A writer could walk away from their pen and paper at any time, but my point is that most choose not to; the self-delusion is sufficient to keep them coming back for the next hit. And for the writer, the only self-help groups are there to enable their addiction, not recover from it. It is easy enough to dabble in the gateways of writing: tweeting, blogging, and wall posting, but for some the hardcore craft will beguile them, enslaving them to a passion that convinces fools that they are scholars and turns scholars into fools. Perhaps such things should bear a warning.

The Twitter Short Story -delivery in progress

This is my second blog about twitter, it's getting to be a habit. If anyone has been following my twitter feed, they will be aware that I'm in the process of delivering a story, Bad Hair Daze, via twitter. Yes, I'm doing it to promote my work, come on, I'm not that innocent, but I'm also doing it because I enjoy playing with new formats and exploring how they can be used. (It's how I got into writing software reviews for magazines like Video Age). The question is, could twitter be a viable delivery tool for short, or episodic storylines, or will it remain the preserve of Haiku's and links to news items?

I'm now into my second day as a twitter novelist (Okay, short fiction writer), so far it could best be described as a learning experience. Bad Hair Daze is a romantic comedy, following the day to day life of Zel, a 24 year old features writer on Hair Magic Magazine. The story is written in a form of diary style, with Zel updating the reader about the events in her day in real-time, as a series of tweets. As a writer this has thrown up a number of challenges, the most obvious being twitter's 140 character limit for each tweet. Frustratingly, this also includes spaces, so lots of short words can be just as bad as long ones. The art I needed to learn was to make each tweet: stand alone –without the need to run onto a second–, still have meaning in itself, and still be able to drive the story forward. The second issue I needed to look at was time. Each tweet must be sent at a particular time, to coincide with Zel's day and the events that are apparently unfolding in real-time. For me, apart from that fact that it plays havoc with my concentration, it has meant getting creative with the means of sending tweets. Normally I can use the computer to send tweets, but to tweet when not at home has necessitated the use of my phone to send them through SMS text messaging. There have been one or two technical difficulties to overcome with this; including switching provider, because my original one didn't work with twitter. I'm also the first to admit I'm useless at tapping out text messages on the phone keypad. To get round this, I send the tweets as text messages using Skype, from my computer to my phone, in advance; it is then a simple matter of forwarding each message to twitter at the scheduled time.
All this should have been fine; it worked during my testing, but yesterday's experience highlighted a couple of issues with the use of my phone. The first being that, for no reason a could tell, it split one of my tweets. I sent it as one text, but it appeared in twitter as two consecutive tweets. The second issue (and lesson learnt) is that, the final tweet of the day lost the last word, appearing in twitter as:
'Evelyn stood right next to me in the lift, touched my hair, and said she liked it in this colour, but it would suit me better shorter. C …'. The last word should have appeared as 'Creepy'. What I had failed to take into account was that mobile phones can deliver more than 140 characters, and my tweet was actually 142; an oversight I should have checked before it was sent to my phone. By the time I realised, parked in a lay-by on the A35, there was really nothing I could do.

I hope that I can work around any future glitches, as I will be relying increasingly on my phone during the London Book Fair next week. Just to be on the safe side, though, I think it will be wise to seek out as many wireless hotspots, for my laptop, as I can.

Aside from any technical problems, I hope that the flow of the story will start to come through as the tweets progress and any idiosyncrasies of the medium will be forgiven as merely a kind of realism to the delivery of the story. I still intend to see the story through to it's conclusion on the 30th April, and hope that those who follow it, find it an interesting and engaging way to experience a narrative. It remains to be seen if it will be worth repeating the experiment, although I do have a longer, and more gritty, story which I may deliver towards Christmas. I may even consider writing another episode to Bad Hair Daze, if this one isn't a complete disaster.

Tweets or Twits?

I learnt today that I am expected to start a twitter account to help promote my blogs. For some reason there has always been some instinct that kept me from going anywhere near twitter. To be honest I can't even be bothered to text on my mobile; it's quicker to make a call.

Don't get me wrong –I'm no technophobe, I've bought into technology; I had a mobile before any of my peers, I took office space in a media centre that gave me broadband back in 96, and I've been designing interactive content for CDs and Websites before most people had the kit to access CDs and websites. Perhaps it might be more accurate to call me a technocynic.

None the less I found myself approaching the whole twitter thing with a little reservation. I began by watching a youtube video by a woman extolling the virtues of twitter to promote her own blogs. Before the video was halfway through I found myself crying. These were not tears of joy, some rapture of realisation, no, these were tears wrenched from the core of my being, tears shed for the human race. What had we become? Beings capable profound understanding of the nature of the universe, philosophy, music, art, who can express the deepest emotion through prose and attain the highest states of self awareness through long meditation, reduced to twitter.

– Pellets of fecal minutiae passing mindlessly from one computer screen to another, pointlessly creating thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide, hastening our own demise.

So of course I had to sign up...

UnforgivingMuse Twits.