In the writing world, creativity is often confused with complexity. Flowery prose that marches on for years, knotty metaphors so strange there’s a reason they’ve never been used before, and dense paragraphs that require a tweezers to get through – that, to certain writers, is success.

I once had a professor who thought reading should be a mental cardio session, a humbling experience that wasn’t complete until you threw the book against a wall in frustration. I never did well in that class; partly because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking he was an egotistic asshole and therefore skipping his assignments, but also because I subscribe to the TLC theory of creativity.

The more to the point you are, the more likely people are to listen.

TLC is a television station that’s not afraid to lay it all out on the table. They’re also not afraid to dedicate about 60% of their airtime to little people, obese virgins, and the occasional show that makes you wish you weren’t eating a burrito while watching. Read more »

Twitter is not especially well-known for fiction. But maybe that will change. Writers are embracing Twitter for the creative challenge imposed by its 140-character limit, for its real-time functionality, and for its interactivity. Twitterature, or Twiction, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is not just a means of reaching today’s ADD-raddled reader–it’s a new medium entirely, spawning new ways to create and interact with fiction.

So without further ado, here’s a short guide to try innovative and interesting Twitter fiction projects, past and present:

@ElectricLit

Electric Literature’s highly anticipated “microserialization” of Rick Moody’s novel begins today, and is definitely worth a read. Rather than chopping up a pre-written story into 140-character bursts as many other Twitter novelists tend to do, Moody wrote his novel Some Contemporary Characters expressly for Twitter and embraced the character limit as a source of creative inspiration. Each section of the novel comes every 10 minutes and lasts until December 2nd.

Bloomsday

Last Bloomsday, two Ulysses enthusiasts took the novel’s 10th chapter, Wandering Rocks, and retraced all the events of that day on Twitter. Videogame designers Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy registered 54 of the novel’s characters as Twitter users, who all Tweeted about what they were doing on June 16, 1904 at the correct fictional times. (Old project, since June 16 is long past at this point, but still worth a read. Here’s hoping Bogost and McCarthy will revive the project in some way next Bloomsday.)

The Twitter of Oz

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An old writing teacher of mine once said to my class, “I read because I’m secretly a peeping Tom. I want more than just a glimpse of someone else’s life–I want to be a full-on voyeur. I want to step into someone else’s skin and see the world from their eyes. Because when else would I ever get to do that?”

So maybe that explains part of the pleasure I get from watching documentaries on Veoh. A user named simply “documentaries” (is it the BBC? an avid documentary fan? the film gods themselves, digitized and uploaded for our mortal amusement?) has hundreds of documentaries online, for free, and I’m starting to worry if my fascination with them has become something of a problem. The documentaries are a veritable sampling of the (intensely) varied human experience and include such titillating titles as “My Car is My Lover,” “The Man With No Past,” “Child Chain Smoker,” “Prostitution Behind the Veil,” and “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.” Lest the titles might lead you to believe I’m directing you to a collection of Jerry Springer-esque romps: all of the documentaries (or those I’ve seen, anyway) are both intriguing and refreshingly fair-minded. And most of them are less than one hour long, which means that when you finish one, it doesn’t seem so indulgent to start another, and then another, and then another… Read more »