Writing a Novel, One Tweet at a Time

Courtesy of Titter.com

Twiterature?

When someone posts on Twitter, it's usually something short and sweet. Either they've witnessed Smoky being cute or the corner store is shamefully out of Red Vines. But writer Matt Stewart, he's trying something a bit different. He's Twittering a novel.

It's called The French Revolution, and ever since Bastille Day on Tuesday Stewart has been posting 140 characters of it at a time on his Twitter page.

The idea, according to Stewart, is not to actually read the entire thing on Twitter (a difficult task when it's only two lines at a time and you have to scroll backwards). It's more of a preview.

“I don’t think anything’s ever going to replace the depth and experience of reading a novel,” he says. “I wrote [this book] to be a rich and compelling work of literary fiction. It’s not written in 140-character sentences. So if you see it, it’s enough to want to hear about more.”

So with a program designed to break the text down into 140-character blocks, the author estimates it will take approximately 3700 tweets, about 50 days, to post the novel in its entirety. That's about one tweet every fifteen minutes.

The story itself concerns "the greatest identity crisis ever," and follows an obese pastry chef named Esmerelda Van Twinkle.

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