Keep the Story Going

The twitter story Hafiz was pretty interesting. I like seeing these kind of stories come together, though it can also bug me. Sometimes the story flows and everybody works together to make a good coherent story. Other times, you get people who don’t take the process seriously, or people that just want to throw in twists every chance they get. If too many people try and through in a twist then nothing makes sense anymore. Then there are those who want to make it their own personal stories, they throw in robots and aliens, even when it changes the entirety of the story. For example, if at the end of this story a giant robot started attacking and one of the EMT’s all the sudden has a gun and starts fighting back against the monster. That could be a good plot in it’s own story, but doesn’t fit into this.

This is reading for those who want to be apart of the story. And not just in a ‘click this link so it seems like you’re progressing the story’ way. You can get involved with the story, put in your idea and see how other people take it farther. It’s a good exercise in working with others for the sake of the story, not for yourself. It also helps build up your own ideas. If you write something down and someone adds something on that you weren’t pleased with then you can start to figure out what you did want to happen next, and after that, and then your writing your own story. It is a tool to tell a story, and help those who want to write.

I was a bit bummed to learn that Teju Cole was the one that wrote everything. Getting his friends to write a sentence on twitter and then re-tweeting them in order was a good idea, but I feel like I was lead on, in a way. I had thought people had wrote in these sentences to continue the story. There was a sort of ‘magic’ there, that all these people put in there own words to make this story. It’s still a good story, and I do like it. It’s just that the spontaneity isn’t there anymore. Knowing more about it dulled it a bit for me, wish didn’t read THE BOUNDARY-PUSHING NOVELIST WHO’S MADE TWITTER HIS NEW MEDIUM.  But it is better to know the truth of it, instead of running around with a false idea.

Even thought it wasn’t what I thought it was, Hafiz is still an excellent story and a great new way to tell your story. It still takes teamwork and it makes the reading experience different. Through twitter, it’s almost like you’re hearing the story from different perspectives, instead of just one. Like the narrator could be anyone, imagine a movie narrator that has a different voice actor every sentence or so. It could be very distracting, or it could change the way narratives are used. Or, most likely, it will only be used by those that are brave enough to use that technique, just like Twitterature.