Story narrative with micro-blogging (Twitter)

Published by neil on June 24th, 2007

FishDog, AngelSpoon, and Kirk are three characters which have been with me for a few months now. They grew organically out of some random text insertions after becoming bored with sensible content for my Skype mood message (a status message visible alongside my Skype name in contacts’ Skype windows).

When Twitter came along, it seemed an obvious transition to use micro-blogging via Twitter to expand the storytelling to a potentially wider audience. To avoid spending time every hour of every day entering tweets into multiple Twitter accounts, I wrote a small php application to enable timed, mass posting of tweets to multiple accounts. That was the easy bit however.

What became almost immediately obvious was that it is very difficult to work a story narrative into the interactions of three or more independent characters without rapidly deteriorating into confusing or mundane posts. Should these characters be able to message each other within the Twitter domain? Are their messages only visible to the voyeur followers? How do we present the narrative as anything other than a tedious list of actions/thoughts/events?

Solidifying the characters
The first step was to remove any preoccupation on how and what, and focus first on who. Who are each of these people? What is their backstory? How have they become who they are within our story? (OK, so a what and a how crept in there for a second, but bear with me…) All leading to: how they will interact with each other and play out the events as they unfold.

It seems an obvious realisation in hindsight that the only way to establish the story of a group of characters is to establish the characters themselves, as fully as possible. Every tome on any form of character based writing will be clear on the need for this, and even in my limited writing experience I should have known it well enough. But in this case, where the story is to be told in 140 (textual) character chunks, there is another challenge, and there are no books written on the subject.

A world broken into too many tiny pieces
140 characters of text is simply not enough to build emotive storytelling in and of itself. Simply using multiple 140 character posts sequentially is an obvious option, but I found that it created a hard-to-follow - let alone write - broken stutter of a story, particularly tricky when more than one character is posting about a particular plot point. Again, the solution started to present itself when taking a step back from the problem, this time to observe.

I started to pay attention to some very prolific Twitterers (is that what they are called? Try saying that out loud after a beer or two). What I found was that those who posted most frequently with some consideration about the quality of the message, and, very importantly, were not simply waffling or involving themselves in little more than public conversations, were able to give me, the reader, a distinct picture and insight into what they were doing and the world around them. Pretty impressive if they can make a remote person feel as though they are truly observing their moment by moment lives.

The way in which these people Twittered has helped me understand a potential way to allow my fictitious characters to tell their stories. In my original attempts it was the story narrative that was my focus. I was hammering the voice of each character into the pre-defined mould of the plot. What I need to do is allow each character their own voice, their own unique ability to play out the plot and therefore swing the thought process in reverse: let the plot be moulded to the directions of the characters.

Still a way to go
Exactly how I achieve this I have still undecided; it’s taking some time to get my head around! But it makes complete sense in principle. The strongest stories are always predominantly character-driven. It is the way in which the characters think, act, react, adapt to the challenges proposed by the plot which drives a compelling story, not the plot itself.

It has been an enlightening process to appreciate that despite wanting to use bleeding edge technology and social communication concepts, the old-school philosophies on developing characters and stories remain true. It’s back to those fundamental paths that I must tread in order to give this little experiment its best chance of life.

Tags: character, Creative, Personal, plot, story, tweet, twitter
Posted in Creative, Personal |