World of Wordcraft

But to non-twitters the Twitter phenomenon still seems inexplicable, and slightly weird. After all, how can you communicate effectively using 140 characters, which is the maximum limit on Twitter? Well, Twitter messages (or ‘tweets’) are very much like Post-It notes and it’s really up to you to decide how you fill them. You can say very little in 140 characters or you can make quite a decent shopping list. Or, to pinch a Tweet from Obama’s Twit-in-residence, you can brief people about something that’s really quite important: ‘Today, after almost a century of effort, health insurance reform has become law.’ That isn’t even 140 characters.

In fact, the more you use Twitter the more interesting fewer words can be. Faced with egotistical blogs the size of War and Peace, not to mention Facebook updates that dribble down the page like baby food, their very shortness can be refreshing: like reading a Haiku after tackling a novel by Henry James. In fact, Hemmingway is said to have considered his finest piece of work to be a six word story: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ I’m not sure if this is apocryphal or not, but the terrible brevity of the story remains. To take another example, this time from a friend, tweets can also be succinctly amusing:

One day the bookshop door swings open. A traffic warden strides up to the desk and asks, “Do you have a copy of Mein Kampf?” - @EdinburghBooks

Twitter resounds with these kind of witty one-liners. A lot of comedians are on Twitter, and if you follow the likes of @MitchBenn or @serafinowicz you will likely be exposed to a constant stream of invention. Sites such as favstar.fm gather favourited tweets together for your edification and amusement.

These tweets often have the charm of novelty, but there is really nothing new about constraints in literature. Haikus are the obvious example of constrained literature, but whoever has studied a sonnet or indeed almost any literature at all, knows that the apparent freedom of a blank page is an illusion. Writers are never free to burble on at any length, unless they wish to confuse their readers and alienate their publisher. Literature – and language – is full of rules. So too is Twitter. Yes, its 140-character rule can seem horribly arbitrary, but is probably no more so than some English spelling.

Of course, ‘great literature’ is unlikely to be produced in 140 characters – or in multiples of 140 characters – but expectations were never high of a networking site that coins words such as, ‘twestival’ and ‘twitterati’ and expects grown adults to use them. There is rather more wit on Twitter than wisdom, but that’s not to condemn the medium as ‘trite’ out of hand. There’s a lot to be said for linguistic playfulness that is communal, succinct, and enjoyable: you can send out an idea or a lyrical few sentences and see what people say; or begin a conversation; or bash out a few words to get over writers’ block.

Or you can use the constraints and quirks of Twitter to have some fun. One of the cultural curiosities that has grown out of Twitter is the notion of the ‘hashtag’ You can ‘tag’ your tweets by theme just by preceding a word with the hash symbol, for example: #lintie. Twitter automatically converts these ‘hashtags’ into a link to the search results page for that word, where you can view all of the most recent tweets using that hashtag. This in turn has given birth to an entire sub-genre of wit. Hashtags are often used to squash together two disparate concepts. The results can be hilarious. At the time of writing this piece, one of the popular ‘mashtags’ is #middleclasssongs, which takes pop song titles and modifies them to reflect middle class values. Some fine examples include: ‘The Echinacea don’t work’, ‘Born to be Mild’ and ‘Ziggy Starbucks’.

Whereas the ‘mashtag’ tends to be a flash in the pan - or indeed a flashtag - there are other battle-hardened hashtags that have stood the test of time. The challenge to compose a very-short-story (#vss) in a single tweet continues to stimulate writers. Examples such as

I held her pretty hand, intertwining my fingers with hers. Enjoying the moment, then putting it with the rest, in the freezer. - @VeryShortStory

and

“My day is better than yours,” Kevin taunted, in his Facebook status update, unaware the others had already been evacuated from Earth. - @VeryShortStory

#vss give some sense as to what people – all kinds of people – write. Many authors have followed this model, composing their own six word stories. On Twitter, you can watch these flowing from writers all around the world, in real time.

In this world of words, it is only natural that literary games should emerge. You can find dedicated Twitter accounts that allow you to play hangman, unscramble an anagram, play a quiz and so on. But in my opinion, the best games are those that embrace the Twitter spirit: encouraging copious submissions, then using favourites or retweets to lift the gems out of the muck. A couple of noteworthy examples are Artwiculate - the daily word game, and my own All-Sorts - which encourages people to submit novel collective nouns.

Have you ever played the game where you are challenged to invent a sentence that uses a specified obscure word? Artwiculate brings that game on to Twitter. Each day, they pick a word and you have to compose a clever tweet using that word before your 24 hours are up. All submissions are collected on their site, where you can upvote your favourtites. The entry with the highest number of votes at the end of the period is called the winner. Points are awarded, and these can be worn as badges of honour. A recent winner was:

I double dairy you to perform vaccimulgence on a mad cow. - @amanuel187

To put you out of your misery, this just means ‘cow milking,’ and is unlikely to be very useful, but you never know. At least, this Twitter game is broadening people’s vocabulary and causing merriment around the globe.

Another joy of the English language, aside from perplexing polysyllables, is the fact that we have a distinct term to describe a group of individuals. You’ve no doubt heard of ‘a murder of crows’ and ‘a troupe of acrobats,’ and but what do you call a group of geeks, or particle physicists, or traffic wardens? I’m sure that you can think of a few ideas of your own (a wunch of bankers, anyone?). And if you get started, it can be hard to stop. I created All-Sorts.org to allow people on Twitter to participate in this game of invention. If this sounds like your kind of game then simply visit http://all-sorts.org/what_is_this to find out more.

These few examples of ‘literary twitterings’ are only the tip of the iceberg, as Twitterers continue to offer their own take on traditional literary projects. Project Twutenberg, tipping its jaunty hat to Project Gutenberg, ‘translates’ novels into 140 character tweets. Last year, the West Port Book Festival, tipping its hat to itself, hosted the world’s first Literary Twestival, encouraging people to get their brains and fingers loosened and start twittering, twutenberging, vss-ing etc.

Meanwhile, other twitters around the globe continue to coin, use, and abuse as many words as they can get away with – and some they really shouldn’t. It can be a mad world, where fact and fiction are virtually indistinguishable, where some people pretend to be someone they’re not, and where language is stripped down to its marrow, and shoved into a virtual world as part of a networking project that seems to tap at the very boundary of reality. If the end result is not Proust, then there’s no need to write it off as piffle. Twitter is only as good as the people who tweet and there are plenty of wits, wags, and writers tapping away, eschewing the novel for a novel form of communication that races round the world in less than a heartbeat.

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