Literary devices
Could the next great novel be written on a cell phone?
Last Updated: Thursday, July 2, 2009 | 3:53 PM ET
By Justine Purcell, CBC News
Keitai shosetsu, or "cellphone novels," are popular in Japan, and the trend could be moving to North America. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images) How does an aspiring writer go about publishing a novel? Historically, the answer has been a combination of talent, hard work and good timing. In most countries, in fact, this is the standard route. The exception seems to be Japan, where several recent best-selling novels began in a rather more modern way.
With sites like Twitter catching on as conduits for instant self-expression, a literary trend that exploded in Japan has potential to take root in North America.
Known as keitai shosetsu, or "cellphone novels," these innovative and ambitious works were written entirely on cellphone keypads and published, sentence by sentence, on mobile-social publishing sites like Maho i-Land (Magic Island). As on Twitter, Japanese readers can choose particular authors to "follow," and then get the bite-size story updates as the writer uploads them. Eventually, the novel is complete, but the demand keeps growing, as readers tell other readers.
The authors are often young, female and go by a single name — like "Rin," who wrote the best-selling cellphone novel If You…, which centred on a high school couple who must cope with the girl's serious illness. The novel ranked second on the national fiction bestseller list in the first half of 2007, selling more than 400,000 copies.
Another bestseller, Love Sky by Mika, was made into a movie. The film hit Japanese theatres around the time that its sequel, Your Sky, was doing its own climb up the bestseller list. In 2008, Yume-Hotaru's cellphone novel First Experience (also about a young couple) was released by a traditional publisher, and became a top-selling title in Tokyo bookstores.
Young Japanese readers devour these melodramatic plots, which are often quite violent – in addition to the usual theme of love in trouble, common topics include rape and prostitution. But these complex issues are articulated in simple, short, mobile-friendly sentences; keitai shosetsu will rarely employ a complicated word when a simple one will do. Take this sentence from If You...:
Sato Hgiwara, an employee of the Japanese company Starts Publishing, displays a book version of a mobile phone novel in Tokyo. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images) I'm short, I'm stupid, I'm not pretty, I'm rubbish, and I've got no dreams.
Cellphone novels have been called out for questionable literary value, but the criticism certainly hasn't come from the readers.
With smartphones becoming serious reading devices and sites like Twitter catching on as conduits for instant self-expression, the trend that exploded in Japan has potential to take root in North America. U.S. author Saoirse Redgrave recently landed a three-book deal with St. Martin's Press after micro-publishing on the site textnovel and placing first in their 2008 writing contest.
Could something like Twitter host Canada's next great literary trend? Lisa Charters, senior vice-president of digital at Random House of Canada, sees it as "a way to establish an audience without print and paper." It's a route, she says, that could work well for a non-established author, where the printed book comes after the writer has built up a following.
Christina Palassio, managing editor at Coach House Books, says "knowing that an author you're about to publish has a dedicated audience would definitely help with margins and sales and marketing planning."
Indeed, it's possible that amid this great technological whirlwind, a Canadian writer could gain fame without touching ground on a literary journal, an agent or a rejection letter.
'Knowing that an author you're about to publish has a dedicated audience would definitely help with margins and sales and marketing planning.'
— Christina Palassio, managing editor at Coach House Books
Twitter, for one, is garnering new writers every day, with people creating everything from haikus ("twitku" or "twaiku") to "VSS" (very short stories). Some authors are tweeting already-published novels, one line at a time. Canadian writer Sean Dixon is doing just that with The Girls Who Saw Everything — released by Coach House in 2007 — in support of the publication of the U.S. edition. In this case, Twitter is being used as a marketing platform, not a writing medium, but Palassio sees the potential for the order to be reversed.
"I'm sure there's an audience of readers out there who would devour cellphone novels if they could get their hands on them," she says.
At present, Twitter does not lend itself to extended reading — having the most recent tweets on top makes long-term reading disjointed at best, laborious at worst. But with a few tweaks, "social reading" could have wide appeal for Canadians, offering the ability to comment, share and even (gasp!) partake in the creative process. It has an underground, folksy feel reminiscent of what happened several years ago in music, with the adoption of MySpace as a community for passionate listeners.
The North American answer to community-driven publishing might not have arrived yet, but according to CNN, websites like textnovel and MobaMingle are starting to find popularity in the United States.
Random House's Lisa Charters feels it's quite likely that readers will adopt "well-written, entertaining" new fiction as it emerges, no matter what the mode of delivery — serialized, electronically or as a printed book.
"There is no question that as reading on mobile screens becomes commonplace for Canadians," she says, "they will not only want to read fiction on mobile devices like phones, they will expect it to be available for purchase in that format."
Justine Purcell is a writer based in Toronto.
