Still More On Twitter Storytelling
Yeah, I’m still picking apart this one.
I linked to a New York Time article on Japanese cell phone novels yesterday. Since then, I’ve been pondering what it had to say about the genre. There were a few key things that the author pointed out that really stuck with me, and I’ve been chewing on them. Key amongst them was this:
Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.
This one interested me greatly. I used to want to be a comic book writer. Actually, I still want to be a comic book writer; I’ve given up trying to be, though. And honestly, as someone who’s studied the genre, I can see how a cell phone novel and a comic book could appeal to the same reader, in more positive ways than the critics cited in the article. After all, both feature stories told in snapshot bursts (a Twitter post versus a picture panel), a lack of dense text (unless it’s an Alan Moore or Chris Clairmont comic), and the constant draw of “to be continued,” be it in the next post or the next issue. The features of one (comics) really would seem to lend themselves to the limitations of the other.
More:
“Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”
“In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”
Again, I can see a parallel with comic books. It has been said that early comic books set themselves in fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham City in part to broaden their appeal–they were, in essence, capable of taking place in Any City, U.S.A. [In fact, when Marvel Comics first published in the 1960s, one of their major innovations was to base their stories in actual locales, primarily New York City.] In other words, a less specific, less real locale can actually become more real to readers, if they’re able to imagine it happening where they live instead of someplace else.
More:
Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.
“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said.
Okay, so, a cell phone story cannot be complex, complicated, nuanced–it needs to be, like texting itself, a shallow, surface-level thing, a quick thrill that doesn’t require effort. While I hate to say it, the comic book is often viewed in the same way, and indeed a lot of comic books are pretty much that same sort of surface-level thrill. It’s part of the reason they’ve become such hot movie properties.
One last thought: it strikes me that “novel” is a strange way to describve these stories. I know, the works were collected into novels afterwards, but, again, so are comic books. The storytelling act itself, th0ugh, is not novelistic, the readers are not engaging the works in a novel-like manner. These are serialized stoies–like, super-serielized, like a Mary Worth daily on crack. IOW, like a comic.
I think you see where I’m going with this …
Leave a Reply