Authors Atwitter

A couple months ago, I wrote about Salman Rushdie's foray into Twitter, a beautiful little experiment on language and the literary community. This week the New York Times published an article by Anne Trubek on the same topic, which makes me feel a) awesome about being ahead of the Times, and b) underachieving because their article is so good.

Anne Trubek and the authors she interviews (Eugenides, Rushdie, and Atwood, to name a few) elaborate on a few of the points I hit in my old blog post: for one, the chance authors have to be accessible to their audience, both for publicity and on principle (that is, debunking the myth of the enigmatic Tortured Artist). For another, that social media is the great equalizer; when The Author engages with The Rest of Us, the boundaries around the literary elite are lowered, and a richer literary community is born of it.

Just thinking of tweets.

Other authors are drawn to Twitter by what the poet D.A. Powell calls its "prosodic tools." The character limit is an open challenge to write the most pithy, perfect one-liners -- no easy feat, as anyone who's been flummoxed by the character countdown knows. Twitter is the perfect arena for the aphoristically inclined; the very brevity of the tweet can bestow the "eclat of a proverb" on even the mundane.

In tweet-form: Twitter is to today's authors what dinner parties were to Oscar Wilde. Minus the meal.