Furthermore, in seeking out Twitter fiction, the biggest obstacle for me was locating and encountering fictional material in a cogent manner. Typically, to encounter fictional narrative in a digital context alone is not so challenging; there are websites and databases that publish such material regularly. On twitter, additional task of needing to separately and discretely track different characters, narratives strung across time or a series of unique posts can be difficult. This fundamentally alters how one perceive the narratives, regardless of the substantive content or topic.
In those twitter narratives that construct a fictional world through several twitter accounts representing characters, institutions, or contextual elements, etc, there is an even greater difficulty in locating a narrative. In that sense, each discrete granularlized portion of a larger narrative is itself a small story. This is basically the point that I think Smith is making about @horse_ebooks
All the various circumstances you might encounter when turning
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) September 19, 2013
While collating unique narratives from across several Twitter accounts to construct the broader one may also be easier with the historical fictional characters that King mentions. The additional context creates more meaning, which itself continues its own suggestive journey, 140 characters at a time, toward a cogent narrative. Smith is pointing to @horse_ebooks faux-random beauty in this disjointed narrative form could only operate on readers with the additional context of expectations and etiquette on Twitter, different from those in the print narrative. A unique dialect in narrative is thus expressed. Twitter fiction, largely in formal ways disrupts the habits and conventions of print fiction, and it demands a new criticism, drawing from other scholarly traditions.
It got me thinking a lot about GIFs, and how they are also a new dialect in digital communication and art. and much of the growth, exploration, and literacy in that area should cross-pollinate for me.
References
King, R.J. (2013). "How Twitter is reshaping the future of storytelling,” FastCoExist. Retrieved from http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682122/how-twitter-is-reshaping-the-future-of-storytelling\
Mak, B. (2011). "Architectures of the page." How the page matters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
PBSoffbook. (March 2012) "Animated GIFs: The birth of a medium." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxKb5mxM8g
Smith, A. (October 2013). "Literary Parkour: @Horse_ebooks, Jonathan Franzen and the rise of Twitter fiction,” Grandland. Retrieved from http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/literary-parkour-horse_ebooks-jonathan-franzen-and-the-rise-of-twitter-fiction/