Twitter Fiction Festival selections

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

After reviewing a wide array of entries from 20+ countries, the Twitter Fiction Festival selection panel has chosen a diverse array of storytelling projects to showcase during the Festival. The external panel was composed of experts from around the publishing industry in the US, but the showcase they’ve selected includes published and novice authors from all over the globe. These special Twitter experiments will be highlighted on a dedicated showcase page during the Festival, starting Wednesday.

The Festival showcase will be a completely virtual event, taking place on Twitter with participants from five continents and stories in five languages. For five days, Wednesday, November 28 to Sunday, December 2, you’ll be able to find creative experiments in story-telling on Twitter around the clock.

As the stories chosen by the panel are showcased during the Festival, we invite everyone else (whether you submitted or not) to tell your stories on Twitter during the Festival too! We’ll highlight a number of your stories from the @twitterbooks account.

Whether you have a big idea or not, there are still some easy ways to get involved:

  • create a character and tell a story in his or her voice
  • tell a story from your own account
  • tell a story in a single Tweet

…and of course, any other creative ideas you have. Make sure to use the #twitterfiction hashtag so that readers can find your work.

The Twitter Fiction Festival isn’t just for writers— it’s for readers too! You can enjoy the showcase selections at the #twitterfiction page. There will be stories being told on that page at all hours of the day during the Festival. You can also find and follow accounts telling stories during the festival by searching the #twitterfiction hashtag.

Without further ado, here are the selections:

Starting with the idea of a Twitter feed used as evidence, author Elliott Holt (@elliottholt) will tell the story of a crime. The audience will see that story unfold via three different perspectives, and then will have to weigh the presented evidence for themselves.
Wednesday at 7pm EST (24:00 GMT) 

Author Jennifer Wilson (@writerjenwilson) will invite Twitter users to help her write epigraphs for gravestones. Posting photographs of the existing stones, the community input will inspire short stories about each of the departed.
Friday and Sunday at 12noon EST (17:00 GMT) 

HarperCollins Australia (@HarperCollinsAU) presents “Around the World in 80 Hours”, a globe-trotting, media-mixing, collaborative story of intrigue. This story will be told with the help of authors Nikki Gemmell (@NikkiGemmell) and Greg Barron (@gregorybarron).
Begins Thursday at 12am EST (05:00 GMT) 

Perhaps no story is more powerful than a myth. Lucy Coats (@lucycoats) from Northampton UK, will re-tell 100 Greek myths in 100 Tweets.
Wednesday 21 Nov. till Sunday 25 Nov. 9am EST (14:00 GMT) 

“Censortive” is a story by a Chinese author that combines the words “censor” and “sensitive” and will explore the idea of permitted speech in the People’s Republic of China.
Every night at 2am EST (7:00 GMT) 

The Museo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología is itself a fiction: @munacyt is meant to create the desire for a Mexican national museum dedicated to science and technology. Over the course of the Festival, the Museum will take us on an expedition in Spanish to a future island in Mexico.
Thursday through Sunday at 11pm EST (4:00 GMT) 

Digital publisher Plympton and Code Meets Print have joined forces to invite readers to submit “Very Short Fiction” using the hashtag #VSS.
Throughout the Festival 

In a project inspired by Italo Calvino’s “Italian Folktales”, @00serialTW is posting Twitter versions of folk tales in Italian.
Thursday through Sunday at 4am EST (09:00 GMT) 

Marcel Lasoen, a very old man, has taken to Twitter to reconnect with his family. Author Marc Capelle, tweeting in French, will bring us @MarcelLasoen’s story.
Thursday through Sunday at 6am EST (11:00 GMT) 

Shakespeare is eminently quotable, and publisher W.W. Norton (@wwnorton) will take advantage of that to offer “Found Shakespeare” selections, retweeting classic lines together into segments of the Bard’s plays.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 12noon EST (17:00 GMT) 

The Gronsteins are a modern American family going through a tough time after Dad lost his job. In Ben Schrank’s (@BDSchrank) story, they share a Twitter account from which they chronicle life in their home.
Wednesday through Saturday at 1pm EST (18:00 GMT) 

London-based Faiq Muneef brings an Arabic language story to the Festival with the story of “The Crying Canary”.
Sunday at 8am EST (13:00 GMT) 

Writing in French, Fabrice Colin (@fabricecolin) will bring us the serialized story of five strangers trapped on a bus and sharing an incredible experience.
Thursday to Sunday at 7am EST (12:00 GMT) 

Emmy Laybourne (@emmylaybourne) and Anna Banks (@byannabanks) will put a humorous spin on the paranormal young adult story with love affair between a teenage girl and a…Sasquatch.
Wednesday through Sunday at 4pm EST (21:00 GMT) 

For author Kurt Crisman (@unpublishedguy) online descriptions of TV episodes tell a story all their own. He’ll weave a whole story together out of these to describe five seasons of a science fiction show with an absurdist twist.
Every day, updated hourly

In the 1960s, @FathomButterfly was a notorious English B-movie star, beauty queen and showgirl. Author Josh Gosfield (@JoshGosfield) has recently convinced her to write a “memoir in Tweets”.
When: Wednesday through Sunday at 5pm EST (22:00 GMT)

“ManyPasts” (or “MuchoPasados”) is a writing game designed by Alberto Chimal (@albertochimal). In English and Spanish, and with the help of the Twitter community, Tweets will form branching stories.
Friday and Sunday at 8pm EST (01:00 GMT) 

Plenty of mothers overlook the faults of their children, and The Proud Zombie Mom might be one of the worst offenders. According to Andrew Shaffer (@andrewtshaffer) she insists her zombie daughter only has “life allergies.”
Wednesday through Sunday at 11am EST (16:00 GMT)

Come to dinner with Dana Sachs (@DanaSachs), who will be working with different literary characters to serve up Stone Soup, a celebration of great writing and (perhaps) truly bizarre food. 
Saturday at 8pm EST (01:00 GMT)

Ifeoluwapo Odedere offers a satire, written in the style of the King James Bible, about a Nigerian community whose attempts to find a sustainable power source are continually thwarted by a saboteur.
Thursday through Saturday at 8am EST (13:00 GMT) 

Stevie Ronnie (@stevieronnie), from Newcastle UK, will tell an interactive poem of 50 lines that, when complete, can be read in either direction.
Saturday and Sunday at 10am EST (15:00 GMT)

In a tense psychological thriller, Andrew Pyper (@andrewpyper) re-tells the classic Henry James ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” — set in a present-day White House. We will follow the Tweets of the new nanny, who is increasingly convinced something strange is afoot.
Thursday through Sunday at 7pm EST (00:00 GMT) 

Writing from South Africa, author Lauren Beukes (@laurenbeukes) will challenge herself to write #LitMash stories: taking incongruous community suggestions (the weirder the better!) and telling a story that matches them.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 10am EST (15:00 GMT) 

From the city that brought us Dashiell Hammett, author Scott Hutchins (@ScottHutch) will tell a modern day detective noir tale illustrated with pictures from around San Francisco.
Wednesday through Sunday at 6pm EST (23:00 GMT)

Lily is a girl who has to make a tough choice of one of two paths. Thanks to this story from Zoe Ruderman (@zoemarianna), we’ll be able to follow Lily’s story down both routes.
Thursday at 8pm; Friday through Sunday at 1pm EST (18:00 GMT)

Joe and Veronica are two cubicle serfs who had a relatively banal love affair and break-up. Alina Simone (@alinasimone) will enliven the re-telling of their story with illustrations and other media. 
Thursday at 2pm EST (19:00 GMT) 

A group of four authors in Paris plan to work together to build collaborative sonnets in French, which they call #TwitRature.
Thursday to Sunday at 5am EST (10:00 GMT) 

Over a hundred years ago Ambrose Bierce betrayed a man by the name of Ulysses McGraw. Now come back to life, McGraw will tell his story with the help of Brian O’Connor, writing from South Korea.
Friday to Sunday at 1am EST (06:00 GMT) 

Writing in Argentina, Marcos Pereyra will bring us a prequel to his Spanish language Twitter thriller “Te sigo” (“I am following you”).
Thursday to Sunday at 10pm EST (03:00 GMT) 

See you tomorrow at the Festival!

Posted by Andrew Fitzgerald (@magicandrew)
Media R&D