Though Twitter is famous for its utility in telling real-life, real-time stories, it’s also an enormously powerful tool for another kind of storytelling: fiction.
Today Penguin Random House (@PenguinRH_News) and the Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish), in partnership with Twitter, announced the second #TwitterFiction festival.
The festival will take place March 12-16 and welcomes entries from around the world, including the UK.
A digital storytelling extravaganza, the festival’s value is twofold: it gives authors of all kinds a chance to bring fiction to life with Twitter, and gives readers a chance to experience fiction in a brand new way.
Get ready…#twitterfiction https://t.co/D9xZYYeyt2
— Fiction Festival ( @TWfictionfest) November 12, 2013
The #TwitterFiction festival offers a chance to be a featured storyteller and create 140-character blasts of fiction on Twitter alongside established and emerging authors.
Twitter is a wide-open frontier for creative experimentation, and #TwitterFiction is a wonderful way to push traditional boundaries. You can create Vine videos, develop multiple fictional accounts, use crowd-sourcing or make use of any other Twitter functionality to weave a story.
Entries for #TwitterFiction will be accepted in any language and can be submitted online here until February 5, and will be judged by a panel of executives from @AmericanPublish companies.
Anyone can use #TwitterFiction in their Tweets to convey a fictional idea, narrative or visual art.
The panel will also highlight select participants to create fiction on Twitter as part of the official week-long, real-time digital festival. These featured authors will be a part of the official schedule, and will be chosen based on creativity, writing talent and unique use of Twitter functionality.
For more information on #TwitterFiction, visit http://twitterfictionfestival.com
*Editor's note: As of November 2017, Twitter has increased the character count of Tweets in certain languages to make it easier to share what’s happening.