The Twittersphere, or at least publishing's corner of it, has been chattering about Rick Moody's experiment with Twitter-fiction--an original story, "Some Contemporary Characters," that he wrote and posted in tweet-size increments over three days, commissioned by the innovative journal Electric Literature. I won't rehash the details of what happened (see accounts here or here), but for various reasons the venture seems to have attracted a great deal of negative commentary on Twitter and elsewhere. Vroman's Bookstore, which joined the project by co-streaming the story, dropped out midway: They reflect on the experience here, calling the project a "noble failure." A blog post at Telereads asks,"Twitter a flop as a book promoter? Or just a failure with SOME books?"
Maybe the Moody project was a failure. If so, my reaction is: HOORAY! What we need in publishing today is much more failure. The one thing people in the industry can agree on is that the current methods of doing business are showing diminishing returns. The only way we're going to arrive at new methods is by trying dozens, scores, hundreds of new ways of reaching readers, building awareness, and ultimately selling content. Of course, some, probably most of these won't work, but it's through large-scale, repeated failure that we're going to find out what succeeds. As Clay Shirky puts it, "Failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn't."
However, I would argue that "failure" is the wrong word to apply to Moody's Twitter story. In science, an experiment is only a failure if you don't learn something from it. Simply reading the comments on the Vroman's post one can see that a few basic tweaks to how the story was presented (like adding hashtags) could have avoided many of the problems that bothered readers. Electric Literature can do it better next time. (And one commenter says they attracted thousands more followers thanks to the story, which is surely a success for them.) Twitter may not be a great new medium for fiction but it may yet be a great way to attract the interest of readers.
By the way, I personally thought "Some Contemporary Characters," as a story, was well worth reading-- intriguing, sometimes funny, and sometimes touching. Try reading it in its entirety in the @ElectricLit Twitter stream (and remember to read upward from the first post, dated 10:04 on November 30th). Maybe it wasn't a masterpiece, but I'd say Rick Moody is to be applauded, rather than criticized, for making the effort.
Someone asked Wayne Gretzky how he became the most prolific scorer in hockey, and he answered, "I figured it out. I missed a hundred percent of the shots I didn't take."
