The Big Interview

Arjun Basu: A master of micro stories. (Courtesy: Jane Heller)

Arjun Basu is a Montreal-based writer who’s composed hundreds of tiny stories, each one exactly 140 characters long, on Twitter. Many of his ‘Twisters’, as he’s dubbed them, capture moments in time that somehow manage to tell much larger stories than you’d think possible. Arjun’s Twitter stream has gathered a considerable following, one of his tiny stories has been adapted into a film, and a book is in the offing.

How did you get started writing micro-fiction?

I don’t have a good answer for this. I wish I could say I had a moment of clarity and started writing with purpose but that would be a lie. Like most lies it might be interesting but it would also be untrue. I had just started using Twitter. I was trying to figure it out. And my first few tweets were guilty of the banality that many Twitter haters accuse Twitter of foisting upon the world. And then I had an image in my head of a baby trying to reach a cookie. It just happened and when you’re a writer these moments happen all the time. If you’re lucky you have a notepad and you write it down. Well, I had Twitter. So I wrote it and it came in at over 140 characters. I edited it down to exactly 140. And the genre was born. A few minutes later I wrote another one and it was also exactly 140 characters. That was last year. I haven’t stopped since.

Can you share the first Twitter story you wrote?

These are the first three. I’m feeling generous:

The kid looks up at the candy bar and wonders how he can get to the caramel goodness inside without waking up the asthmatic narcoleptic cat

And then the walls crumbled. He picked his way through the rubble and found her, eating Fruit Loops out of the box. “Wow,” she said, smiling

John said, don’t come close, I farted real bad. But when she shrugged and said, i don’t care if a nuclear bomb came out of your ass, he knew

What made you decide to stick to exactly 140 characters, rather than simply sub-140 characters, which would be limitation enough? Have you created a rod for your own back, or has that strict requirement aided creativity?

It seemed to me that anything other than 140 characters wouldn’t make the stories Twitter-specific. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it within the limitations imposed by Twitter. Writing at exactly 140 characters was the challenge then. Sometimes it feels limiting but every form has its limits, right? If you’re not writing 7/5/7 you’re not writing haiku. If you’re not writing in exactly 140 characters, you’re not writing a Twister.

You’ve coined the word ‘Twisters’, meaning super short stories written for Twitter. What made you decide you needed a new term to describe what you were doing?

This was my dog peeing on a fire hydrant moment. I don’t claim to invent the short short story or the micro-fiction or anything of the sort. That would be the height of hubris and though I’ve been known to start climbing that mountain I’m actually rather humble. But I saw that I was on to something.

The only rule for my stories was the 140-character rule. Meaning this form of short story was going to be Twitter specific. And then I needed a stupid name because almost everything associated with Twitter has a stupid name. Let’s admit that. I badly combined the words Twitter and “story” and came up with Twister. I’m still not sure how that works. But it’s stuck and it seems to have become an accepted name for 140-character stories. So we’re stuck with it until the bigger and better writer comes along and rebrands the whole thing. But I peed on that fire hydrant first.

Having marked your territory by giving the format a name, does that put any extra pressure on you creatively, in the sense that it marks you out as something of a “spokesman” for Twitter fiction?

I don’t think so. The fact that other people use the term is flattering. But there are a myriad of terms out in the Twittersphere. And I’m sure for most people on Twitter, a Twister is still a bad disaster movie starring Helen Hunt.

Unlike most public spaces for fiction, Twitter allows for instant feedback. What response have you had to your Twisters, and how has the immediacy of review and criticism affected what you write?

Twitter is catnip for a writer. The instant feedback is awesome. As writers we’re so used to isolation. To silence. Twitter breaks the wall between writer and reader in a profound and immediate way. I know when something’s good and when something’s bad within minutes. People aren’t afraid to @ me to let me how they feel about certain Twisters. And they let me know when they don’t like them as well.

And some people even throw a few words at me and make requests. Someone told me about how her daughter had squeezed her pet hamster a bit too tight and asked me to write a story; I did and it ended up being very popular. And she told me her husband loved it so much, he put it up on his wall in his office. Where else could I get that kind of inspiration and feedback? As a writer, Twitter’s been quite magical, frankly.

A favourite Twister inspired by a reader’s email.

If Twitter is your catnip, has it shifted your focus away from other writing forms and goals?

That’s a good question and it’s always been my fear. This wasn’t a planned project for sure. I fell into it and I got obsessive about it. I’d like to think I’m past the obsessive phase though. Or maybe I’m delusional. But on the whole, I don’t think it’s shifted my focus away. It did for a while but I’m back on track now. If anything, my longer form writing (I write short stories mostly and I’m working on a novel as well) have been helped by the Twitter project. I find myself acting on random phrases and images that pop into my head much quicker now. A writer likes to say he’s always writing but we all know that the majority of that time is spent doing nothing. I find my “nothing” time much more productive now.

What do you think has driven the large reaction to your stories on Twitter?

Two things: the element of surprise, and the brevity of the stories. A story in 140 characters. If you have even the slightest bit of ADD, well, I’m writing for you. But I also think people are moved by the story. As creatures, we love a good story. And so if you’re on Twitter and then a story pops up every once in a while, it almost seems like a bonus. A nice respite from the rest of your day. That is if the stories are any good.

Some people are going to look at these little stories and say they’re just a novelty, a passing fad. What’s your reaction to that?

Let them. Frankly I don’t care. They may even be right. No one is going to guarantee Twitter’s survival. But the short short story has lived for a long time. And I think text messaging, for example, and other microblogging services are also going to last. So in that sense, I don’ think what I’m doing is a fad. I’m just creating fiction for a very specific media.

You’ve done some live public readings of your Twisters as well. What’s that experience been like? Is the feedback in person as honest and raw as it is on Twitter?

The public reading was a kind of experiment. (I) read a short story and then I read probably a dozen Twisters. I can read in about 10 seconds so we’re not talking about a huge time commitment. I wanted to call that bit Instant Gratification Theatre but didn’t in the end. There was nothing theatrical about it. I stood on a stage and read. Though I think the Twisters would make neat little plays. They’ve already inspired a movie, after all. In terms of the live feedback, it was even more immediate, at least for me. I heard the laughter, for example and that’s pretty immediate. Luckily, the audience laughed at all the right parts.

A lot of your Twisters feel like a snapshot in time from a much larger story. Before you were writing on Twitter, did you have just as many ideas but nowhere to write them all? Or has the new outlet led to more ideas?

I don’t see the stories as interconnected. They may be in the sense of themes. I think there are four basic themes I’m writing about here: love, family, work and the “degradations” of life. So that’s why they might feel interconnected. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this and I can see why people would think this is all part of something larger. I’m sure if I sat down with all of the stories and thought them through I could actually piece together something larger. But those four themes are, I think, what I write about in general. My book of short stories from last year (Squishy) was basically about those small insignificant moments that have meaning much later. Sometimes life-changing meaning. In that sense, the Twisters are doing the same thing, but in micro form.

I didn’t mean to suggest the stories felt interconnected, although as you can say I could understand why someone might. What I was getting at is many of them feel like they have the potential to be written as a standalone short story, or even a novel, rather than as a Twister. I wondered whether these were the sorts of ideas you used to have often, but since they couldn’t all find a home in a short story, some of them would never have been written down at all?

I agree - some of these could be longer. I think some of them are nuggets for larger pieces. If they are, I might not need to have another idea my entire life. But in terms of creating stories before, I would say this: writing these Twisters has changed the way I approach ideas. Before, an idea, a series of words, whatever, I would write them down. Now I have to complete an entire thought. I have to finish the thought I have to create a coherent Twister.

That’s interesting. So what is your creative process for writing Twisters? And how does it differ from the way you approach your longer-form writing?

I get an idea. I start writing it. And if it has legs, I finish it. So there’s not much of a difference. Only a Twister takes a few minutes to complete.

You mention that you think your Twisters could make neat little plays. Your Tweetcloud seems to confirm you use a lot of dialogue in your stories. Is dialogue always a big part of your writing? Or is it a particularly effective tool for saying more with fewer words?

My writing has always featured a lot of dialogue. I hear characters talking in my head all the time. I’m not schizophrenic, I swear! But if you look at my published work, dialogue is very important for moving my stories forward. Through dialogue we can see two people communicating or not communicating.

As you also said, one of your Twisters is already a one-minute film. How did that come about?

Filminute is a relatively new online international film festival. One of the organisers was familiar with what I was doing on Twitter and he showed my work to a director he knew, James Cooper. We hooked up, I sent him a bunch of stories, and James chose one of the Twisters.

A still image from Life, a film based on one of Arjun’s stories.

Did you get any say in the film adaptation?

James showed me each draft of the script and I added my two cents on each draft. He was very respectful toward me and toward the source material. So yes, I did get a say but it is James’s movie - he wrote the final script, he shot it, he edited it. It’s his.

Writers often have issues with the way their longer-form work is translated onto the screen. Were you happy with the result? Did it do justice to the original?

I think James did a fantastic job. What drew him to the story is the many ways it could be interpreted and I think that’s one of the unique aspects about the Twisters - they are small but the world they create is quite big. And perhaps open-ended. Any adaptation needs to take source material and make it work in a different medium. I think James’s film does that.

Your Twisters have also become a book proposal. How is it that these little stories are so adaptable, shifting form from simply Twitter to a book, film and potentially plays?

That’s a good question. I think when a publisher goes for the proposal, it’s going to be very interesting. Let’s see what the process is like, how involved it is. There are some Twisters I look back on and I want to change things. A book will allow me to do that, to go through one final edit. The fact that these little stories are so adaptable must say something about the nature of the stories themselves.

Like I said earlier, they inspire many interpretations. Like the movie, for example. James and I have both noticed that women in particular don’t know why the antagonist has to punch the holy man. And James shocked me when he said some of his friends thought the premise racist. I don’t see that one at all. I was asked what the film meant and I said I saw it as a reaction to pop culture clichés. That’s what’s getting punched. One of the reactions I often get is the surprise over “how much” I can pack into 140 characters. I guess that’s where the varied interpretations come from.

I think that’s definitely what’s most interesting about the form. Hemingway is said to have called his famous six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) some of his best work, and it packs a lot into just 33 characters. Do you purposely try to leave something to the imagination in your stories, or is it simply impossible not to?

I think it’s impossible not to. In some stories, I’m really just trying to paint a picture and there are bound to be some fill-in-the-blank spots. I also trust the community of readers. With the dynamic that Twitter creates, I’ve gotten to know quite a few of them. They are a smart, funny and extremely imaginative bunch.

Having the Twisters published in a book might mean they’ll go through a more traditional publishing process, involving editors etc. Could you ever see that there’s room for an editor in the Twister writing process?

No. In a way, the 140 character limitation serves as a very difficult editor all on its own.

What response have you had to the book proposal from the publishing industry?

I think with what’s going on in the publishing industry they are going through an extremely conservative time right now. No one wants to take a chance. At the beginning of the process there was a lot of interest but there was also a palpable sense of confusion about Twitter in the editors I spoke to. They didn’t understand the audience. They didn’t understand Twitter, frankly. So far Twitter has produced two kinds of books: how to books and crowd sourced books that generally tend toward the joke book, like Twitter Wit, edited by Nick Douglas (@nick). The idea of a book of extremely short stories is something that publishers are initially attracted to but then they pull back. Now, I think the industry is looking to see how the crowd sourced books do before deciding what to do with me. I’m lucky in that my agent believes in this project (he found me) and he’s pushing the idea. I really do believe it’s a matter of when not if.

What tools do you use to create your Twisters?

It’s just me and my computer. Sometimes I wrote them on my Blackberry. But that almost always produces typos.

Do you read other people writing in this format? Do you have any favourites?

There are others. @VeryShortStory does good stuff. @InstantFiction. @motkedapp. @redsaid1. I’m sure I’m leaving people out. Now, none of them are writing Twisters. I don’t think anyone is doing the 140 character thing like I am. Maybe I’m just the dumbest of the lot.

Thanks very much to Arjun for being the first Big Interview. Three of my recent favourites from Arjun’s Twitter stream are:

I can never ever do what I want, the kid whines and as he yells and stomps off to his room and slams his door, his father sighs, Me neither.

He says, Well, I never. And she says, Oh stop. And then she punches him. And he falls down. And she kicks him. And she says, You always did.

He never watched the news. So he was surprised to see a tiger in his backyard. And a helicopter overhead. Now he wished he was wearing pants