Announcing the Twitter Fiction Festival

Twitter is a place to tell stories. Often those stories are about news, or politics, or perhaps sports or music, but it turns out Twitter is a great place for telling fictional stories, too. As one professor from Michigan State University says, “Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice.” We want to celebrate that.

At the end of November, we’ll host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival — a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter. The Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction) will feature creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

Twitter has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter has even inspired some literary criticism.

Now we want to go further! Twitter is a frontier for creative experimentation, and we want to invite authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content.

If you’d like to take part in the Twitter Fiction Festival, submit your idea here. Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment? The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival — but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour.

We’ll announce the selected authors and festival agenda on Monday, November 19th and the festival itself will kick off on November 28th. We look forward to reading all of your stories.

Posted by Andrew Fitzgerald - @magicandrew
Editorial Programming, Media Team