Social Stories

Inventing social fiction before it had a name

Before "transmedia" was a buzzword and before "social storytelling" was a strategy, these projects were finding out what happened when you used Twitter, blogs, and social platforms not for broadcasting but for fiction. Between 2007 and 2012, I created, wrote, and organized a series of social media story experiments that put narrative into platforms never designed to hold it.

The projects ranged from a Twitter novel adaptation of Herman Melville (one of the first of its kind) to a 90-minute live reenactment of the Death Star attack at SXSW, to a massive multiplayer Halloween epic based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. Each one was a different answer to the same question: what does a story look like when the audience is inside it?

Writer, organizer, and instigator

For each project, I was the primary author and organizer: writing the source fiction, designing the participation frameworks, recruiting and coordinating performers and collaborators, and moderating the live experiences as they unfolded in real time.

• Wrote The Good Captain: a Twitter adaptation of Melville's "Benito Cereno," one of the first Twitter novels
• Created The Spoon River Metblog: 244 blog posts adapting "Spoon River Anthology" as a group blog, with a hidden code leading to a secret epilogue
• Organized #SXStarWars (2009): a 90-minute live Twitter reenactment of the Death Star attack at SXSW 2009, covered by Variety and the official Star Wars blog
• Produced Cthalloween and Undead Pride Day: mass collaborative Halloween events drawing on Lovecraft and classic monster mythology
• Adapted The Empire Strikes Back across 65 Twitter accounts; organized a sequel #SXStarWars (2011), a Star Wars/SXSW mashup, and later #SXSWesteros, which gave the same treatment to Game of Thrones

Making platforms do things they weren't built for

The constraint was the point. Twitter's 140-character limit, the reverse-chronological feed, the public/reply structure — these weren't obstacles to work around, they were the form. A Twitter novel forced compression and real-time pacing in ways prose couldn't. A live hashtag event created shared experience across thousands of strangers simultaneously. A group blog could give voice to an entire fictional community.

The collaborative events required the most design work: recruiting performers, writing character briefs, timing the beats of a live story unfolding across dozens of accounts, and staying responsive when the audience started participating in ways you hadn't anticipated. (That last part was always the best part.)

An early proof of concept for social fiction

The Good Captain and The Spoon River Metblog were both presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art; The Good Captain was also featured at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and led New Scientist magazine to dub me "The Epic Poet of Twitter." #SXStarWars trended for two days after the live event and was covered by Variety and the official Star Wars blog. #SXSWesteros was covered by CNN.

Taken together, these projects established a vocabulary for social fiction that later became standard practice — character accounts, live narrative events, platform-native storytelling. They were also genuinely fun to make, which is why I kept making them.