'Twitterature' is coming...

I am of two minds about this (not that anyone’s asked me, or would).

On one hand, it’s kind of intriguing. It’s always a good idea to at least experiment with new forms of production and new types of media. It may be a colossal failure, it may end up being a very short-lived success, or it may end up creating a new format for literature. Japan already has text-message novels, so what’s really the difference between that and Twitter lit? (Twit-lit? I shudder.) Also, the idea of compressing ‘classics’ into a more ‘manageable’ size is not exactly a new one. SparkNotes, Cliff’s Notes, and my personal favourite from a humour/entertainment perspective, Book-a-Minute . Really, this idea doesn’t sound that different from book-a-minute, at least right now.

But it remains to be seen what they’ll do with (or to) the books that they adapt. Is it just going to be plot summaries, in twenty tweets? Is it going to be twenty selected 140-character passages? Because classics aren’t classics merely because of the story they tell. They’re classics because of the way that they tell it. A writer’s style – the way s/he uses words, constructs sentences, lays out the paragraphs on the page, and so on – is so much a part of what makes a book a ‘classic’. Are these students going to maintain the authors’ styles, or is it going to be story reductions only?

When ‘Twitterature’ is released, I expect there will be howls of outrage over people who will read ‘Twitterature’ instead of reading the ‘classics’ that they condense. And there will be plenty of them. Just like there are lots of students who read SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes or Wikipedia pages about books instead of reading the books that they’re based on, not to mention the people who watch the movie and think that qualifies as knowing the book. People forget that the plot of a book is not the same as the book itself. Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary have the exact same plot, but they’re not the same book. (Persuasion and The Edge of Reason are an even closer connection, plot- and pacing-wise. Still not the same book.)

If ‘Twitterature’ is a way to reduce books while still maintaining a sense of the author’s style, then more power to them. If it becomes a gateway for people to get some exposure to a ‘classic’ and then read the full thing, then again, more power to them. If it is just a quirky way to summarize books that were on a high school reading list, then it’s not nearly as innovative or ambitious as they want it to be.