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Adapt or die. They excite me.
i think they should scare anyone who writes anything but their grocery lists. i have trouble asking questions that fit in twitter boxes, let alone expressing ideas. and people in this country can't read as it is, we shouldnt be encouraging that by putting romeo and juliet out there without any vowels, we should combatting it.
Sharing your material is one of the first steps in realizing that this is a career path that is fundamental and worthwhile. There is a weird romance with written word. An obligated notion, always forming, even when faint it's still there. There's love/hate. Finding your voice, literally and figuratively. It's enlightening. You follow what you love. Like nkwilczy said, adapt or die.
#wtfbrblmaohashtagbullsh!t
I think we're a dying breed, but when everything crashes pages will be bound somewhere.
The only things you can do is stick to your guns or adapt to the new market.
When you say text books, I'm guessing you mean books composed of collected text messages, and not school books.
I think they can be just as legit, profound, wonderful, silly, or stupid-- just as other styles of writing are.
The best example I can think of is Toshiko Fukada's book of texts to her late husband. It's a collection of everthing she wanted to say to him before he passed.
People should be able to - and should in general - experiment with different lengths and forms of storytelling. It's when people only want to read Twitter and text stories that I will put my foot down. But so far I think the variety is an opportunity, and I'm interested in what's possible.
I have found @arjunbasu's Twitter account to be very entertaining. It's interesting to see how someone can be so creative within 140 characters.
While I'm intrigued by what's possible with twitter and texts as far as literary progress is concerned, I've got a list of books I need to read longer than my right leg, so I don't have the time to get to them.
Does prose need a certain length to be valid? Do we need to define it by how it challenges our sensibilities? I love Twitter. I post short strings of madness, humor, poetry, and whatever else comes into my head. There are whole communities that devote themselves entirely to perfecting the form of it. Much in the way of haikus or really any restricted narrative device. I suppose the misnomer is to relegate the whole site as part of a marketing strategy and presume that any post fame value is simply to advertise the sequel. Twitter has a variety of niche communities that thrive on linguistic manipulation without restriction to genre. With Twitter there is an opportunity to master language a sentence, a word, even a character at a time.
One of the great things about prose in all its forms is that it is always collaborative on some level. Like all types of books, people will choose either to read or not to read text books and twitter books. Hopefully no one is made nervous by these popping up. If you are a writer and you prefer writing longer works, write longer works that are compelling. Let's face it: writers of books are already competing with non-book tweets and texts for people's attention as it is.
There must be some literary potential in Twitter, but Twitter apologists have not, so far, proven to be very focused writers. Maybe that's the point, though. I don't mean on LitReactor; it seems to be a trend to talk about the potential for new kinds of writing on Twitter while not actually doing any innovating.
I got some news by email once because a friend didn't other wise know how to get ahold of me. He wrote, "Nick's dead." It had a lot of impact, obviously. I understand most books can't get the same gut wrench as a hearing of a friend's death, but I think we over look that you can pack a lot into a few words. With short stories or novels you think you have pages and pages so you don't have to. I don't think the Tweet will ever replace a good book, but it might teach us how to put more into few sentences.
And yes, most Tweets are crap. Go to the book store and scan through the romance section. Every format has tons of poorly done junk you have to sort through.
