“My wife woke me up last night to tell me there was an intruder in our house. She was murdered by an intruder two years ago.”
The cyber world is awash with these kind of twisted little shockers. Encased in crisp sentences, sometimes exactly 50 or 25 words, theseshort stories brim with creativity.
An experiment was the inspiration behind PhD scholar Shaheen Ahmed starting a genre called tiny terrible tales and putting up small stories as status updates on Facebook. “I love playing with text as well as horror. I make an attempt to explore the uncanny. I was inspired by these short stories that I came across on social media. These stories were horror/tragic stories completed within a sentence or two. My genre is a little longer than that and comprises four to six short sentences.”
She contends, “Social media is an extremely effective medium to express creativity and find an audience. A lot of people love experimenting with different forms of creative expression, be it writing, art, photography etc. It is not always possible to present them in a ‘formal’ circumstance, such as a book or a gallery exhibition. But when one shares their work on Facebook or Twitter, they not only end up showing their work but also let people know what they have been up to creatively.”
Srikant K.P., a fan of such short stories on social media sites agrees with Shaheen’s assessment. “I have seen many friends post small, to-the-point stories as their status updates. It is a very interesting concept since it keeps one engaged and results in healthy conversations on these platforms. Occasionally, people even give a twist to the story. It is good fun. It is better than mundane messages that people put up or high-pitched, pointless, political arguments on Facebook. The fact that it’s short and concise especially helps people like me who are unable to spend much time reading books. I hope this trend continues.”
A creative director in an advertising start-up, Philip John, started putting words to thoughts to amuse himself and was surprised to find people loving it so much that he created a dedicated Facebook page, Labyrinths . “I think what technology and social media have done for storytelling is to give it back its emotional immediacy. In a 200-page novel, there is time to set the stage for complex emotions. But in a 140-character tweet or a Facebook post, the writer is forced to strip the story down to its most vital emotional elements. In doing this, he digs deeper inside himself, uses fewer words and writes with unflinching emotional honesty. It is like knocking back a shot of tequila as opposed to nursing a cocktail,” he laughs.
He adds that there is more and more writing like this on the net. “Just type a thematic word on Pinterest and you’ll be stunned at how much pure, potent imagination floods your brain in less than five minutes of browsing. Storytelling in the digital age has re-discovered its raw, elemental power, its power to move people with real emotion, and to make them think about what they read. This is made easier by the ability to access the story at the click of a button and to then share the story in real time.”
Deepa Jacob, who works in a game developing company, was inspired to create her page a wealth of stardust on tumblr after she was given a test while applying for the job. “I was asked to write a story in exactly 50 words as part of my assessment. I fell in love with the brevity and challenge of it. What started as a writing exercise I set to train myself, became something I fell in love with. I like that it can reach people online. It is short and they don’t have to take time to read it. And writing a story in exactly 50 words is a thoroughly challenging and yet enjoyable experience.”
She points out that every form of writing style has its own kind of message. “The novel is a completely different kind of reading experience. But the shorter and more powerful pieces are what stay with me longer.”
