Twitterfiction

Twitterfiction

Alison Flood

Guardian

For Neil Gaiman, it began with a disconcerting image of a girl spoken to by her reflection in a mirror. For Melvin Burgess, it was a mother told by a passing elderly woman that her babies weren't human. The two award-winning children's authors have both begun to dabble in storytelling via Twitter, with Gaiman's experiment on the micro-blogging site concluding today, but Burgess set to carry on tweeting.

"I thought I'd start with a line and see where it went," said Burgess, whose controversial novels have tackled subjects from teenage sex to heroin addiction in the Carnegie medal-winning Junk. "It's more just to be able to write something under no pressure – for fun – and let it go where it will, rather than worry if it will be acceptable or published."

He started writing in 140-character bursts on Twitter in September, and has already written three stories: the alien babies tale, called The Dancer; a story about a lonely woman who finds a strangely affectionate creature in her garden, Happy Ever After; and Double Dare, about a girl who sells her soul for unimaginable riches. He embarks on a new one, For the Love of Cake, today.

"It's ideal for people with short attention spans," said the author, who tweets at @MelvinBurgess. "I only work in short bursts because writing takes a lot of creativity, so after about 20 minutes I need to surface and do something else. Twitter is probably better than solitaire."

Gaiman, whose latest children's novel The Graveyard Book has picked up a trio of major US awards and is shortlisted for the Booktrust teenage prize, began a crowd-sourced Twitter tale last week, posting the line "Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled and said, 'We don't love you anymore'" to his 1.2 million followers at @neilhimself.

His story is part of an experiment with the BBC, with fans posting follow-ups and BBC Audiobooks America sorting through responses over the last eight days. The 1,000-tweet tale was concluded today, with the publisher hailing a "rollicking, epic fairytale, set in a fantasy world, with an endearing coming-of-age story at its heart". It is now planning to record the whole thing as an audiobook.

Burgess said that his Twitter stories "seem to be emerging in a Ray Bradbury-esque way". "Because you're doing a sentence at a time, every line has a certain weight. Quite often I don't know where it's going to go," he said. "The stories do have a certain quality to them, but whether their bizarreness is down to the medium I don't know."

Gaiman and Burgess are not the first writers to experiment creatively with Twitter. In April, the Booker prize-winning author Ben Okri (@benokri) posted a poem via Twitter, while historical crime novelist RN Morris (@rnmorris) has been tweeting 140-character chunks from his novel A Gentle Axe since March. And in August, historical novelist Philippa Gregory began a series of tweets in the voice of Elizabeth Woodville (@elizwoodville), heroine of her latest novel The White Queen.