As we enter the second month of Azrael’s Stop, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the use of Twitter as a storytelling platform — both on its own or as a driving platform, and as a smaller part of a transmedia story.
Twitter has already been used in a lot of innovative ways for storytelling. Caitlin Burns had a great article about it last year, with several good examples. A now-common trope is for fictional characters from other stories to have Twitter accounts — like WriteRCastle from ABC’s Castle. Caitlin Burns herself has three of her characters from her indie transmedia production Jurassic Park Slope tweet regularly and to each other (and talks more about the use of Twitter on that project’s production blog).
Such a use of Twitter is a great way to develop characters. Audience members can get a feel for the characters outside the direct plot of the driving platform, see the kinds of things that interest them, and even interact with them through @replies and the like. Some of the characters from the browser game Echo Bazaar have Twitter accounts as well, and will occasionally interact with each other (shedding the tiniest bits of light on some of the deep secrets that that game is built upon) and with players who @reply them.
But there are lots of other uses for Twitter in storytelling.
Twitter can be used to present micro fiction, individual stories in 140-or-fewer-characters. An account called @twitterfiction presents these (or presented them, last year). One called @thepoetrybean does the same for short short poems. A writer named Nick Warren presented similar twitter fiction, and is now working on a related project that explores a character through Twitter over time.
It can also be used to tell longer-form stories over time, such as a novel tweeted bit by bit. The so-called “Twiller” is one example of this, with one author tweeting a novel sentence by sentence. The problem I see with this method of Twitter storytelling is that it doesn’t really take advantage of the medium. Like a lot of poorly made adaptations of stories, it’s simply trying to shove one medium (the novel) into another (Twitter) for which it was not designed.
But another kind of Twitter novel exists that does take advantage of the medium, and that’s the crowd-sourced novel. One example of this was done by BBC Audiobooks and Neil Gaiman, called Hearts, Keys and Puppetry. Gaiman tweeted the first sentence, and then the audience was invited to continue the story, with each subsequent sentence chosen from a bundle of submissions. The final story was compiled and produced as an audiobook. Tim Burton conducted a similar experiment, choosing each sentence after his own first one to put together a complete short story.
While a story writer may be willing to give up some control of a story to an audience (depending on the desired level of audience participation and influence) he may not be willing to give up all control, as a crowd-sourced story almost does. Perhaps a better way to tell a complete story (rather than something tacked on to a separate driving platform) that takes advantage of the medium is to follow what Caitlin Burns says when she writes, “Twitter is not just a journaling of events; Twitter is theatre.”
In 2010, a group of rabbis got together to Tweet the Exodus, with different Twitter accounts taking different roles and playing out the story of Exodus over the course of March 16-29.
Another group of writers and actors is crafting a science fiction story at starvoyageonline, chronicling the characters’ interactions and difficulties along the way.
These stories take more advantage of the medium, presenting a kind of live theatre for an audience, ongoing over several days, weeks, or months, with interactions among multiple characters, but still within a contained story.
On this spectrum of authorial control — from crowdsourced to contained — there’s a lot of grey area. One of those areas is in role-play. This is where a situation is set up and audience members are invited to participate as characters in the storyline, interacting through Twitter. Pandemic 1.0 did this to some extent at the Sundance Film Festival this year, with characters on twitter played by actors, but also inviting the audience to interact with them and create their own characters in the story. Jay Bushman, a twitter storytelling innovator, has conducted a few such experiments, such as The Talking Dead, which I participated in last Hallowe’en. In that, players were invited to create dead characters (including celebrities) whose ghosts had been drawn back to the world, and then interact with each other. Over the course of the weekend, the authorial voice imposed a few changing situations for us to react to, culminating in a fun climax. (Jay Bushman and Caitlin Burns were together guests on the Transmedia Talk podcast last November, discussing the use of Twitter.)
This method allowed the author to tell and direct a story, but it was the players that really created the narrative through their interactions and their responses to the story cues. (In this way, it was much like a game of Dungeons & Dragons.)
A group called Reorbit has put together a number of individual Twitter plays reimagining real-life people or fictional characters, like tweenage Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, and the Big Friendly Giant.
David Levithan has an account for his book The Lover’s Dictionary, presenting essentially bonus content to go along with the novel.
There are a lot of different and interesting ways that Twitter can be used as a storytelling medium, both part of a larger project or all on its own. But there are certainly some difficulties to keep in mind as well.
Time and Barriers to Entry
I talk a lot about barriers to entry of a transmedia project, because I have come across them so frequently. When you read a book, it’s easy to get into, because everyone knows you can just pick it up, open to the front, and start reading. If you’re trying to get into a Twitter fiction project it becomes harder — especially if it started months ago. How do you get to the beginning, especially if there are multiple feeds? Do you have to know everything that’s happened so far to understand what’s happening now? What if you want to know what’s happened before anyway? Is there an easy way to do that?
As soon as an audience member finds some barrier, some point where they might have to do some extra work to get into the story, you’ve potentially lost them as an audience member. And with Twitter, which is so heavily based in time, and which could have multiple characters or accounts tweeting to each other, and could have audience participation and so on, this becomes a major potential problem.
You could have a separate site that compiles everything that’s happened so far — but as Caitlin Burns points out in her Twitter fiction article, is that missing the point of using the medium, if you have to go to another medium as well to make it work?
I think if you’re doing something like trying to tweet a linear novel, you are missing the point. But a separate website could be just the thing you need to help catch people up and bring them into the current part of the story. Or, if your story is enjoyable no matter when people come it, a separate site could serve as bonus material for those who do want to delve into the archives.
But there’s another barrier to entry for Twitter stories — and that’s twitter itself. Compared with the number of people who watch movies, say, or the number of people who use the internet, or who use Facebook even, the number of people who use twitter is miniscule. And a lot of the people who don’t are very adamant in their refusal to use it, and furthermore don’t understand the tropes of the medium (@replies, hashtags, etc.). If they’re asked to follow a story on Twitter, they will likely simply refuse. You will be unable to reach that audience segment, and it’s a significant one.
I think that’s another place where a separate page of some sort could be useful, a way to translate what you’ve done on Twitter into another format — admittedly, one less suited to your purpose (otherwise you’d have chosen it as your driving platform) but one that allows a wider audience to appreciate and follow your work, even if in a manner that is not quite ideal.
Rights
If I craft a story that invites audience participation, who controls the rights to what the audience submitted to my story, when done over Twitter? I’m honestly not sure what the answer to this question is, and might require a look at the Twitter terms of service. But it’s an interesting question, given the Neil Gaiman novel, and given similar examples — such as Tweets from Tahrir, compiling twitter accounts of the Egyptian revolution into a book.
Azraels Stop
Clearly these are things I’ve been considering for Azrael’s Stop, and as I began that project and tried to get all my friends to follow it, the barrier to entry of Twitter itself was one of the first and most common problems I faced. That’s why I quickly exaplined how to follow along on the twitter page without having a twitter account, and that’s why I’ve also created the Archive page, for people to catch up and follow along. I may do more things like that in the future — things that will help people get involved, but without compromising the benefits of using twitter as my medium in the first place.
Another consideration I made in the initial design was the issue of time. If you follow over time, you’ll get a better sense of the characters and their evolving relationships and troubles, but my hope and goal is that you don’t absolutely need to have started from the beginning to follow along. You can jump in, and start finding out who these people are (perhaps after the briefest of introductions, such as you get Inside the Stop).
Finally, as Caitlin Burns notes, the medium of twitter intrinsically invites participation:
Twitter invites direct response by the audience in a way that other media do not. Twitter breaks the fourth wall by inviting the audience to reply, simply by using the platform.
…and I’m interested to see if that goes anywhere as well.
Twitter fascinates me in its potential for storytelling, much as transmedia does overall. There are clearly a lot of different ways Twitter can be used as a storytelling medium, with fiction, theatre, and social interaction. There are of course problems associated with it as well, but I think as long as those problems are kept in mind they can be worked around.
Do you know of any other good examples of Twitter-based storytelling? What worked? What didn’t?
8 comments
Aaron Williams says:
March 8, 2011 at 4:43 pm (UTC -7)
Hi Lucas – Great post! Agree with your findings, and appreciate your detailed analysis. Twitter storytelling is a real thing (Jay Bushman’s work is some of my favorite thus far), but I think all these experiments have taught a few key lessons that still need more consideration and exploration as a group:
1) Agree with your barriers to entry. My biggest concern is that Twitter is a stream that has no obvious “last week on this show” mechanism. So, somehow we want people to easily join mid-stream like a soap opera, but we don’t seem to have the right mechanisms to bring them up to speed. I like the idea of an archive, but I think we need more. Will Twitter provide this, or will we need to innovate around it?
2) Telling a story through Twitter is by its nature 1:millions and for the most part, I don’t think fans will be part of the story, they’ll be voyeurs. Which is great, we can stil tell great stories to voyeurs, but if the story really wants to react to users, we either need better scripting or we have to pay for full-time writers to guide the story, and I’m not sure how the economics work out to be able to afford that. Which leads me to ….
3) Twitter does not have a clear direct monetization stream. Mostly, this doesn’t matter because these stories will be budgeted as “marketing” to a more lucrative medium like a movie or a TV show, but it would be nice to have better social gaming monetization (virtual goods, sponsorships, etc.) available to the story teller. Surely, we can do better selling story elements than some very successful companies have done selling virtual farm animals. Right?!
Anyway, very happy to see the conversation continuing. And excited to be part of the community figuring this stuff out. Expecting to see some more kick-ass ideas at SxSW. Would love to meet up for a beer there, if you’re around. Cheers! Aaron
Lucas J.W. Johnson says:
March 8, 2011 at 5:15 pm (UTC -7)
Thanks for the comment, Aaron!
1–Precisely. I think it would be great if Twitter had some kind of option to, for instance, view tweets in chronological order instead of the reverse, or to curate a feed from multiple sources (like the in-beta Storify seems to promise). Perhaps we will need to innovate around that, though–but with twitter’s API available, I’d like to think it’s possible.
2–And yet Twitter is easily interactive, as mentioned, with @replies and such. Even in cases like celebrities, who have millions of followers and rarely respond to individuals, people @reply them. If your audience is huge, yes it would be difficult to reply to everyone, but selecting a few things to respond to a day is not unreasonable. (YA author Maureen Johnson does a thing where every day she answers Four Questions (#4Q) over the course of, say, 10 minutes. Why not use something like that?) Scalability is absolutely a potential problem, but not an insurmountable one.
3–True! But if there are any other media attached to the story, *they* could be potentially monetized. A twitter account could link back to another site, an online store, etc.; it could help drive traffic to the things that are monetized. Furthermore, you can make protected accounts that only approved people can follow–why not only allow those who pay a small fee access to the feed?
So, yes, I completely agree, but I think there are certainly ways it can be made to work!
Wish I could be at SXSW, but the travel expenses of the recently-graduated, start-up freelancer are minimal, and I *must* be at the Storyworld Conference this fall! But I’ll be keeping an eye on my Twitter feeds for SXSW
Robert Pratten says:
March 10, 2011 at 5:27 am (UTC -7)
The key to success with storytelling in any media is to work with the strengths of the platform. Twitter is a real-time, social, conversational stream that is best used to invite and build participation. Thinking of Twitter as thousands of 140-character “book pages” is the wrong mindset. It’s like thinking that a short story is just a long story with fewer pages or a short film is a 15 min feature film.
The key to Twitter storytelling is:
(a) use it to invite participation. Create scenarios and “exercises” that open the door to followers to contribute. Make it conversational. Allow followers to become advocates by facilitating the spread of the participation, not only the spread of the tweet. That is, it’s not simply a RT of the story tweet but an invitation from one follower to a non-follower to get involved – perhaps using some game mechanics with the storytelling to provoke and reward that.
(b) recognize that Twitter is both a Discovery and an Exploration platform. That is, current & recent story tweets and the participatory tweets are Discovery content – they’re luring audience into the world. At the same time the historical Tweets offer backstory and context – Exploration content – for those in the audience that want to dig deeper. Hence you’re right that audience should be able to dip in at any time in the life of the story and become immediately engaged without having to read the premise/synopsis etc. The way to achieve this is to finely craft each Tweet so that it works like a Zen koan – it’s a 140 character meditation on the story that is revealing, intriguing and surprising. This is particularly important if the tweet is from the voice of a narrator rather than a character. I have always measured the strength of a short story by whether it leaves me thinking about the premise of the story for longer that it took to read. The same should be true for every Tweet. Remember that twitter is a real-time news stream which means you’re only as good as your last tweet
(c) use it to build & populate the world. As I hinted above, a story might have several Twitter streams from the perspective of different characters or entities. This means that while a “narrator” stream might tell *the* story, other streams might shed new light and different perspectives on the narrator’s voice. As with any transmedia experiences, these new streams should all add value to the core narrative yet at the same time be optionally consumed. One example I’ve been exploring with a storyteller is to have a twitter stream for a fictional Government bureau in much the same way as George Orwell has in 1984 – the stream sends continual optimistic official news “production up by 120%”, “inflation static at 1%”, “crop yield the best since records began” – which is directly contradictory to the experience of the narrator! Such a stream builds out the world with a new richness but is timed to impact the through narrative should someone choose to read both. I appreciate that this may contradict the “Zen koan rule” but then it’s not being used for Discovery, it’s Exploration so I’ll allow myself some latitude
In terms of commercializing the Twitter platform, it’s value is in the social spread of the story and the building of audiences. Revenue should be taken from other platforms.
Calls to participate “case (a)” are much easier to provide examples for than the koan “case (b)” although you’ve listed some good places to research.
Jay Bushman’s Twitter stories are always provoking and inspiring followers to create their own stories. He brings the fictional setup, let’s say the context or the world, but then it’s up to everyone else to bring their imaginations and participation.
For #sxsw we’re running a rather trivial story of the Three Pigs by way of illustrating the mechanism of participation and interactive narrative. Firstly we stage the story as a competitive game between the pigs and the wolf – the battle outcome determining the course of the story – and secondly we’re using tweets from the pigs and wolf to provoke reaction and participation from friends and followers. Using our Conducttr platform we can facilitate some of the invitation to participate using our “3rd party reply” feature which takes a follower’s friend’s Twitter ID and sends it a message from the fictional character. What we’re doing is not meant to be a gold-standard example of this thinking/storytelling in action but a simple eye-opener.
Robert
Nedra Weinreich says:
March 12, 2011 at 10:21 pm (UTC -7)
Great post, Lucas. I’m exploring this too, and you’ve done a great job of highlighting the issues involved. My biggest frustration is that there’s no easy way to let someone start at the beginning and read through tweets chronologically. Twitter Lists are a great way to aggregate what several different characters are saying in the right order, but you still have to read them backwards. (Maybe a story like the film “Memento” would actually work really well!)
My favorite bit of storytelling via Twitter and other social media is what the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark did a year or so ago with their modern-day retelling of “Romeo and Juliet” – Such Tweet Sorrow: http://suchtweetsorrow.com/story/ (and a great overview of the project at http://thomdibdin.co.uk/?p=939).
We’re all learning as we’re going, which is what makes it so fun, right?
Best,
Nedra
Twitter como herramienta para contar historias | Noticias TransMedia says:
March 21, 2011 at 8:50 pm (UTC -7)
[...] descripción surge como respuesta a un artículo en Silverstring Media con una amplia recopilación de las formas en que se puede y se ha usado Twitter para contar [...]
haritz says:
March 23, 2011 at 2:24 pm (UTC -7)
I recommend you http://365musicaltweets.com/, another way to tell stories with Twitter and music
Lucas J.W. Johnson says:
March 23, 2011 at 3:01 pm (UTC -7)
Very cool, thanks for passing that along!
Pelayo Méndez says:
April 2, 2011 at 8:15 am (UTC -7)
Really in depth analisys of twitter fiction.
I´m interested in using Twitter as collective unconscious author. Here yo can se my prototype:
http://www.lovevshate.tv
Love vs Hate it´s a visualization system that uses the Twitter stream to generate a visual story. It also generates his own music from samples.