The Dickens you say . . . Texting a Novel?

The changes in how technology is affecting writing are not limited to blogs and other social media. My friend Seth over at the Cup 'O Books blog recently posted exploring one of the inevitable outgrowth of the increasing popularity of text messaging is that someone would apply it to other forms of expression—in this case a texted novel.  Textually.org reports that the novel "The Last Messages" by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala strings together about 1,000 of the texts and replies to tell the story of an IT-executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India over 332 pages. Although admitting that he hasn't read any of the novel (I can't read Finnish either).  As usual, Seth's post is thoughtful and asks some interesting questions about this use of language and expression, but he comes down to the following:

Unfortunately, I think texting a novel will really turn out to be like writing one in crayon; nothing more than using a tool for creating words out of its expected context.  I haven’t read the book, but I suspect that it is more novelty than serious undertaking.  Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun.

The links in the post by Textually.org, which focuses on texting and SMS shows that this is the tip of the iceberg.  There are reports on authors who are sending novels out to cell phone users as serials and even mainstream publishers (well...Harlequin) are getting in on the act.  I've been reading blog posts on my cell through Google Reader for a while now and, other than the eyestrain, it works for me (and would work better if I had a slightly larger screen) [the part in italics was added a couple of days later--I just couldn't let the sentence hang there . . .]  Of corS,  dEz R not RitN n SMS lngwij (follow the link at the end of Seth's post to translate if you need to).

Comments

[Greg]

You may be right about that, Abram. But as the phones (plus "Crackberries" and other devices)themselves change these developments continue to push writing and publishing in new directions. It's fascinating to watch (and participate in some limited way).

BTW, thanks for alerting us to the link, which has been fixed.

[Abram Bergen]

I seriously doubt the texting generation, with all their shortcuts, will have the attention span to read a texted novel. A comic strip, perhaps, but a novel? And if--I consider it only remotely possible--the texted novel does make it,I wonder what it will do to the novel itself, and to the use of language.

Interesting, though.