Twitnovels – Crowdsourcing Novel Community

Posted on July 19th, 2010 by Akky Akimoto

Twitnovels opened on 12th July by two Japanese companies, Heartrails and Marici, is a community based novel writing platform supporting Japanese and English “relayed” novels.

“Relayed Novel” is a form of online writing which you can sometimes see on Japanese forums like 2-channel. There a forum reader starts writing a short text, then someone continues, keep writing by group to finish, if they can. There has been many open source scripts for the “relay novels” and they were set up for years to decade.

Twitnovels offers a specialized platform only for this relayed novel writing, with Twitter account. You may pick up any existing unfinished novel and write a following story. You can also make a new branch at the middle of other novel, to change the direction of the story and create a new derived story.

Branching and Updating are notified to related authors. Feedback to each novel chunk can be commented, too. Those features encourage involved authors to keep writing on and group plotting/elaboration.

Japan is known by its “cellphone novel” culture. There is also a relayed style poet renga tradition lasting 700 years. Social authoring may generate something different from regular novels.

See Also:

English tutorial for Twitnovels on Twitnovels itself

Creative Writing Assignment

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Akky Akimoto

Leader at Asiajin
@akky is one of the first pro-bloggers in Japan [J]. He also leads Asiajin, writes for The Japan Times, consults for some foreign companies interested in Japanese web market. (please inquire to akimoto on gmail.com).

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