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Real-time Fiction: a Guide
This is frontier territory; beyond that line of jagged prose there be dragons.


The writing equivalent of the Blair Witch, or Cloverfield, something a little different that must use prose only as a thin wash over the story.

Using tweets to drip-feed the narrative directly to the reader is pretty novel. This is a strange and unfamiliar format, even to me.  Follow it as a reader and you catch the story, blink and you’ll have to scroll back to catch up. Twitter isn’t the medium to simply deliver an existing piece of prose fiction line by line, no-one will want to read that. As a writer it takes some planning to write a story that unfolds in real-time, but it doesn’t need to be difficult or intimidating to do.
What makes any story a good story is an interesting premise, strong believable characters and an engaging narrative. Put this across as a succession of tweets that unfold the story in a fictional real-time and you have a temporal tale.
When setting out to write a temporal story there are a few things worth thinking about:
  1. Temporal fiction lends itself to the first person perspective, written as if the narrator/character is sending the tweets. 
  2. Like any story, a beginning establishes the characters and setting, the middle moves the story on from the driving incident/motive and the end brings it to a conclusion along with any consequences. Give it some structure.
  3. The story will unfold over several hours or days, so try to pace the delivery of tweets to allow the story arc to work with that, making sure interest is maintained even on the days that are leading up to the major bits of drama.
  4. In some respects a temporal tale will work more like a film script or radio play than a short written story. It is worth writing a treatment beforehand, and planning how the story will unfold and how long it will take to do so.
  5. Making short plot notes also helps as these are already part way to being tweets in their own right.
  6. Note down any extra foibles that occur to you about the characters or situation, these can often be worked into the main story arc to for additional interest/drama/comedy.
  7. Most likely any dialogue will need to be reported, unless it is addressed directly to the reader.
  8. Believability should be maintained: if the story had been relying on the character sending tweets on their phone and they get tied up, how are they going to be able to send the tweets?
  9. Twitter is a restrictive medium; there are only 140 characters for each tweet (both MS Word and Apple Pages will give a useful character count of any chunk of text you select), avoid having to break a segment of story into more than one tweet. But if it can’t be helped then try to use a device like an interruption to make this seem more plausible.
  10. Short snappy delivery of the narrative as reports or recounts is easier to write and read.
  11. A one day story may need more tweets than a five day story, but there should be a tweet every few hours to keep the audience interested. 
It sounds like I know what I'm doing, though I'm only one step ahead.These points aren’t rules, they are just things learnt from messing round with the format,
an experimental format. With it anyone can be a ground-breaker and make up the rules as they go along. Go on, surprise us all.
@TemporalTales is looking for submissions of stories by new or established writers that can be tweeted over a period of one to fourteen days. 

3 comments:

  1. I'm not sure my brain could wrap itself around writing stories this way, but it's a fun concept. Looking forward to reading the next one as it's published.

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  2. Thanks Jocelyn, you never know what bush inspiration is going to jump out from.

    I hope you enjoy it.

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  3. I've really enjoyed the first two stories. This is an experiment I'm very much looking forward to seeing unfold over the coming weeks and months.

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