How to write a novel, 140 characters at a time

By Hana Baba

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Back in the ’50s, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” challenged how people thought a poem should sound. Recently, e-books challenged how we think a book should feel. And now, the Twitter Novel is challenging how a novel should be written.

Journalist Doug Sovern took it upon himself to write a novel on Twitter. That means just what it sounds like – a complete novel, written entirely in tweets, live on Twitter, only 140 characters at a time. Every day, he posts about six or seven tweets of the story, and says, he’s making it up as he goes along. It’s the story of Zoe, a troubled woman who lives on the streets of Berkeley. Her character is loosely based on the life of Sovern’s real life significant other, and her story is called TweetHeart. KALW’s Hana Baba sat down with Sovern in our studios to ask him how he writes a Twitter novel.

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