Based on Brevity: Fiction in 140 Characters or Less

This paper examines how short-short stories published on social media platforms such asFacebook and Twitter experiment with brevity. It examines the use of devices such as planned spaces between words, colors, and enjambments, a genre called twitter fiction, to deliver the literary after-taste of ‘byte-sized’ fiction. What are the ramifications, requirements, and results of this form of brevity? Since the works are written and published on/for the digital media, what other aids supplement the reading process, if any? What forms of innovation does this conciseness allow? Two platforms of reading and writing short-short stories (of 140 characters or less) will be used to examine these questions: Terribly Tiny Tales on Facebook and Very Short Story (@veryshortstory)on Twitter. Keywords: digital humanities, twitter fiction, brevity, short story, technology, social mediaThe six-word story by Ernest Hemingway, written in the 1920s, can be seen as an exemplary precursor to the recent burgeoning of short-short stories on Twitter and Facebook. To clearly define the term in the context of length is a complicated process as not only do short-short stories have different names, there is no fixity in terms of how short they must be or which style or form they deal with – ranging from myths and fables to serialized novels. However, works that are strictly 140 characters or less come under the subset of short-short stories and are popularly known as ‘140 stories,’ ‘short-shorts,’ and ‘very short stories.’ These are mostly published on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and personal blogs to allow immediacy in writing, self-publishing, and reaching out to an audience. Restricting the work to this minimum character limit allows the writer to publish the work across different social platforms.Therefore, the underlining requirement of this form of literature is that it must be brief. This becomes the first and the most important prerequisite for the genre.