Twitter’ary piece of fiction

Social media has helped revolutionise not just the way we communicate with each other, but even the way countries and governments function — a la Arab Spring and urban online governance. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one social media platform in particular, Twitter, has helped create a collection of micro stories, curated by Delhi-based advertising copywriter Manoj Pandey titled Tales On Tweet.

What started as a Twitter handle (@talesontweet) to help Manoj get feedback about his personal writing in 2011, has turned into a select 50-tweet collection of stories that have been illustrated by noted Japanese graphic artist Yuko Shimizu. “I was working on a book and at the time, I was drawn into the details of writing, like forms and structures of sentences and I was looking for ideas and criticism from people. So I thought, why not do it on Twitter ” explains Manoj, who adds that Oscar Wilde’s epigrams also influenced the project.

After gaining a few hundred followers, Manoj began tagging his favourite authors on Twitter in his tweets who responded with stories of their own — Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Margaret Atwood and Jeet Thayil have all contributed to the project. Manoj says, “I started doing some research and found authors like Oliver Jeffers and China Miéville, whose books defy the rules. And so I thought maybe I could come up with a book myself.”

After months of editing and curating through thousands of tweets, Manoj enlisted the help of illustrator Yuko to add to the already gripping stories. “Every story is like a plot waiting to be explored. The illustrations brought life to that aspect. What couldn’t be expressed in words, is expressed in the illustrations,” Manoj says of the artworks.

Already working on a novella, Manoj says that micro story projects such as his will only get more popular with time: “I think it’s just about the attention span of people getting really low, and the rush that we live in everybody wants to have a quick read and move on with their lives. No one really has the time to read War & Peace anymore.”