As Jonathan Franzen and JK Rowling are parodied on Twitter, Ceri Radford looks at the rise of the sarcastic tweet, and asks how this social network is fuelling literary spats
Author Jonathan Franzen. Photo: Finn Beales 2012
11:20AM GMT 12 Mar 2012
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Publishing used to be a closed world, characterised by impenetrable cliques
and the long wait for musty brown self-addressed envelopes to appear in the
post. That, however, was in the days before sites like Twitter brought
writers, readers, editors, publishers and agents together into a seething
mass of instantly updated, publicly accessible sniping, moral support and
badinage.
Last week’s #JonathanFranzenHates
hashtag - in which bookish Twitter users roundly mocked the author for
dismissing the site as “unspeakably irritating” – is just one of a number of
instances which show how the use of social media is opening up literary
circles. The sort of sparring that may once have occurred only in waspish
letters to the editor of the London Review of Books now plays out in
real time on the internet.
Meanwhile, for anyone struggling to decipher what is actually going on with
the publication (or not) of their book, the #publishingeuphemisms hashtag,
which began when the agent Jonny
Geller started tweeting a few home truths, is an education. Examples
include: “this
is too literary for our list” = it’s boring, "sadly
we are publishing a similar book to this next spring" = it too has a
beginning, middle and end, and "all
our focus is on the paperback" = the hardback tanked.
Since any Twitter user can join in by using the same hashtag, ideas like this
spread quickly, in this case from rogue agent to writers only too happy to
lift the lid on the slippery half-truths and glib hyperbole of their
industry: ”literary-commercial
cross-over”: “Has a plot but not too many adverbs” contributed
the author Nina Bell. “Eminently
marketable”: “This author looks fit” added Catherine
Fox.
A shared sense of humour holds most literary hashtags together. If brevity is
the soul of wit, then Twitter is its trumpet, allowing users to blast out
their pithy jokes in no more than 140 characters at a time. Whatever Franzen
says, that is often enough.
Following the news of JK Rowling’s first book deal for adult fiction, the
hashtag #RowlingforAdults was swift to materialise, with lines like “Harry
Potter and the Enlarged Prostate” and “Ginny Potter And The Daily Bottle of
Pinot Grigio While The Kids Are At School” (from @Popehat).
Puns are almost as popular as Harry Potter. On another thriving hashtag, #literarydietquotes,
the author Julia Kinghorn contributed “Tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this paté paste until the end of time”.
None of this is as simple as writers turning to Twitter to publicise themselves and their books. At best, the site offers a surrogate sense of community to authors sat at home with only their computer screen and a houseplant for company. From my own experience, dipping into bookish circles on Twitter is like a trip to the watercooler, a morale-boosting break from the isolation of slogging towards 80,000 words.
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