Interview: author who narrated Indian epic The Mahabharata in 2,628 tweets
is an experiment, actually. At that point, I was reading a fascinating retelling of . So it was the story foremost in my mind. When I began seriously thinking about it, I became more convinced was a great choice. To keep the readers interested across weeks and months, I needed a powerful story, one rife with drama, strong characters and conflict. had all those. Also, war narration in the media is one of my research areas and, in a rather reductionist way, I had begun to think of as a war story. So there was added resonance for me as an academic as well.
When I began this in 2009, Twitter was getting big. It was acquiring a variety of audiences, readers who engaged with it differently, more proactively. There were a few writers experimenting with fiction, mostly short stories in 140 characters - what have come to be known as "Twisters". The question that came to my mind was, could you actually tell a longer story here, in a stream of micro-episodes? This was already happening in Japan. People were writing fiction as text messages. If it could work as a series of texts, why not as tweets?
I was very excited about it, so I just started publishing straight away, without too much planning. It attracted some media attention, suddenly there were a lot of followers, and the commitment became firm. And I began thinking ahead. I did have an idea of where I wanted to end the story, fairly soon. I didn't think it would work if I faithfully followed the original all the way to the end. I didn't sketch outlines, though. I knew I had to find an entry point that was different and engaging, and I knew I had to end each episode with a cliffhanger. So when I began a new episode, I decided where it would start and where it would end - and then went ahead connecting the dots. But this all came later, probably after the first few hundred tweets.
I think of as a realistic retelling. This is not the story of gods and demi-gods. It is a real-world story - of earthy characters, not unearthly beings. It is true to the classic in terms of the main characters and events, but the interpretation is different. It's a first-person narrative from Bhima (a main character from the righteous side), so it is his version. I am also tempted to say this Bhima is different. He's a reluctant warrior, who hates war. So this is an anti-war story.
Actually, the 140-character limit didn't trouble me that much. After some initial wrestling, I think I found it more liberating than limiting. It demands a level of directness that frees you from the pressure of writing a lot and allows you to just get on with the story. You are not quite writing conventional prose here. You are writing for a new platform, with its own specific requirements. For me the main pressure was time. I was doing this in between other things, so it was difficult for me to be disciplined. I would disappear for days, weeks, and someone would tweet, "Hey, what's happening?" I don't think I would have finished this but for that.
Twitter is a hyper-live publication platform. It's near real-time, and there is a certain immediacy about the interactions on it. To fit in as "Twitter text", and capture audiences used to its urgent stream of bite-sized publications, I felt my story needed to be told as not what happened, but what is happening. Twitter was sympathetic to "presentification"; it was made for what some literary scholars call "NOW moments".
There are many now who read fictional accounts on mobile phones and tablets. There are "Twisters', and longer narratives, serialised over time. London hosts a TwitterFiction Festival. There's a wonderful site called Nanoism, which not only publishes great Twitter fiction, but actually pays for it. There are academics studying it, journal papers and book chapters being written - so it already has made a mark.
