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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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. Read more »

This week: writers say the darndest things, Americans buy the darndest books, and also some zombies. Read more »