Is This the First Twitter Short Story?

A week ago tonight, on Wednesday May 8^th, it was already late evening here on the West Coast when I saw a tweet alerting me to a story unfolding online out of Washington, DC. It was the Twitter feed of John R. Stanton (@dcbigjohn) whose profile describes him as the DC Bureau Chief of BuzzFeed, plus “reporter, former bouncer and all around dc bama.” (This last term will be explained shortly.)

I started following the series and tweets and as I did, found myself sitting up straighter, waiting for the next.  It was a riveting story – complete with questions and comments from interlocutors in the Twittersphere – and when it ended after 44 tweets (by my count) I felt like I had read something. 
 

The next morning I was trying to figure out how to share it with a friend, one who is not on Twitter, and I had the idea just to do a few screen grabs and then give the always odd-sounding ‘read from the bottom up’ direction.  But when I checked @dcbigjohn’s feed again, he had tweeted that Clinton Yates (@clintonyates) had ‘storified’ his ‘tweeter rantings’ of the previous evening.  When I clicked through, this is what I found: http://bit.ly/10x7aIZ

I’ll give you a moment to click on that link to read through the Storification. But before you do, here is where the explanation of ‘bama’ comes in: ‘bama’ is apparently an idiom specific to the DC area, originally describing a countrified Southerner (as in Alabama) whose dress, manner, etc. made them conspicuous in the big city.  Now it’s apparently taken on the additional connotation of street person – a ‘whack-ass’ according to one of the definitions I read.  Just FYI…

Here’s your reading break.  Click on that link above, read through the tweets, and join me back here.

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And we’re back. Isn’t that something? The story John Stanton has written is remarkable.  In somewhere around a thousand words, he introduces a distinct setting, then with deft strokes of detail gives the reader fully fleshed-out characters. Next is the main dramatic incident, the injury of the main character, and in the telling of that, Stanton widens the story with more characters, giving us a sense of the community in which these events are unfolding. Then to another crisis, and a resolution aided by the storyteller himself (letting the reader know he is apparently aptly named as dcbigjohn). Last is a denouement that updates us on the main character and the community in which this took place – and the writer’s concerns about both.

That’s a lot of story for a thousand words.  And when I found myself thinking about it repeatedly, I realized it would be an excellent exercise for writers, because telling your story in a succession of 140 characters bursts forces you to distill the elements to their essence.  

Not that you have to go ahead and post the tweets, but just give it a try.  How much story can you tell in less than a thousand words, 140 characters at a time?  And let me know how it goes. 

In the meantime, I'm going to be checking out the wonders of Storify.com.

Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  You can see samples of some of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.