My roommate is obsessed with Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust, and Coraline. He got really pissed when I confused Gaiman with yet another Neil, Neil Stephenson, author of Snowcrash (the favorite book of all my nerdy and punky friends in high school).
I apologized but didn’t take it to heart because I didn’t think Gaiman was all that big of a deal — not enough, at least, to warrant my roommate’s obsession.
I was wrong, apparently.
Sci-fi nerds on the internet are super excited this month because Gaiman partnered with the BBC to run an experiment in creative fiction — on Twitter. We’ve written about Twitter fiction before (here, here, and here), but this is different. Gaiman tweeted the first sentence of a story, and then readers and Twitter users make up continuations to the story by tweeting under the hashtag #bbcawdio.
His first sentence was posted on October 13th:
Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, ‘We don’t love you anymore.’
And what happens after hundreds of people from all across the world post their responses? Mashable blogger Barb Dybwad explains:
Out of the chaos of the multi-threaded responses, BBC Audiobooks will be making an attempt to stitch the best narrative together. When the final script is compiled, they’ll head into the studio to actually record and produce an audiobook of the Twitter experiment, which will be available as a free download from the BBC as well as available at iTunes and other audiobook retailers in time for the holidays.
Yeah it’s a bit chaotic, because the chronology is unclear (everyone is tweeting at once), but the BBC has taken it upon themselves to wade through the muck. Hopefully we’ll come up with something cool at the end. Gaiman’s not the first to do a project like this (see here, here, and here), but he’s definitely the most high-profile writer to use the micro-blogging service to generate new stories.
While I definitely don’t think Gaiman’s project will generate a brilliant story, I’m interested in this as a social experiment. I guess I’m too traditional to allow for twitter-generated literature.
Interestingly enough, the story has (so far) stayed on track with Gaiman’s original Sam character, and has grown to include a Coraline-esque subplot of puppets and mirrors.
To follow the story, log on to Twitter and search for the hashtag #bbcawdio.
