Challenges
These are your literary tasks, you Twitterary adventurer! Good luck.
Flash Fiction
Fancy writing that pithy 140 character story? Following in the tradition of great Twitterary adventurers like @VeryShortStory, we invite you to write your tale using only one tweet. And please include the #wpss - West Port Short Story - tag so that we can identify your contribution.
You can see the most recent stories using this beautiful visualisation.
Collective Nouns
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
- A wunch of bankers
- a ______ of mime artists
- an epic of fail
- a whorde of prostitutes
- a curse of internet explorers
Think you can do better? Submit your novel collective nouns to All Sorts.
Pass the Plot
Pass the Plot is the game of consequences on Twitter.
Consequences is the old parlour game where one person writes part of a story on a piece of paper, then folds the paper in such a way that only the last few words are visible, before passing it on to the next person who continues the story.
Trivia: the technique is attributed to the surrealists, and also goes under the name of 'Exquisite Corpse'
Pass the Plot differs from consequences in a few ways. Rather than having a linear plot, with each successive player carrying on from the former, Pass the Plot allows each plot point (or act) to have any number of continuations. The structure that emerges better resembles a tree, rather than a list.
Unlike consequences, Pass the Plot allows you to see everything that went before. And because it uses Twitter, everything is limited to around 100 characters.
A couple of extra constraints are as follows:
- A maximum of 5 acts are allowed
- You may only continue a plot which you have not authored
To clarify the latter point: if you start a plot (authoring Act 1), any logged in user can continue your plot (authoring Act 2) except for yourself. However, you can continue by writing Act 3 in response to any of the second acts which followed your introduction. You would not be able to contribute to Act 4, but you would be entitled to conclude with Act 5.
As a guide line, the arc of a story should go something like this:
- Act 1 - Introduction
- Act 2 - Conflict
- Act 3 - Climax
- Act 4 - Reaction
- Act 5 - Resolution
Project Twutenberg
Project Twutenberg takes classics of world literature and translates them to "twiterature" - from weighty tomes into saucy tweets.
Everyone is free to do their own tweetbooks their own way. We will be putting out calls for specific books that need converting. But you can submit other books too. @twutenberg will retweet the best twiterature.
Your instructions: digest a well-known book into a tweet and add #twbg to the end, like the glacé cherry on a word bun.
Some examples:
#twbg Farewell, arms! (from @pozorvlak)
#twbg A doctor hydes himself in questionable pursuits, falling foul to the lure of a drug which, gradually, robs him of his life. (from @wpbookfestival)
He'd be mad to fly dangerous bombing missions, but if he's not mad then he has to. Screwed either way, Yossarian bravely runs away. #twbg (from @narrator)
See more of these at Project Twutenberg