As today’s Tweetisode gets published it will bring to an end the 12 weeks of the Tweet Rhapsody. The Tweet Rhapsody takes six Twitter accounts and creates a 2000+ Tweet conversation which creates the Tweet Rhapsody story. The details of “what” it is, I have blogged about, but the how and why… well that’s another story.

The How

Technically the Rhapsody is very very simple. So simple in fact that the entire technology was finished in a matter of three days. The site, its design, the wonderful portraits purchased from an artist on iStockPhoto and the bots which post to Twitter. In short from conception to realization the Tweet Rhapsody came together mostly over a single weekend.

The process for posting each Tweetisode went thusly: Write the 25-40 Tweets place them in a spreadsheet which automatically checked for lengths. For each Tweet I entered the GMT time which I had to mentally calculate for its relevance to the story and to what it meant to Montreal, Canada and Colombo, Sri Lanka. I did discover that conducting a romance between those two countries is entirely possible with the time zones (just in case someone wants to try in real life).

Once the Tweets were done, all I had to do was import the CSV directly into the MySQL database and the programming would take care of the rest. This included showing it appropriately on the web site as well as a bot which would post to the Twitter stream of each individual character. Simple, sufficient and in the end worked very well.

The Why

It’s not every day someone wakes up and says “I’m going to write an Internet-based romance between Sri Lanka and Canada and I’m going to use Twitter as a medium”. I can guarantee that that is likely not a thought most people wake up with. I did.

The Tweet Rhapsody was written to accomplish several tasks. One was a technical test of a generic platform I had written in PHP and Zend Framework with MySQL as the database, this platform I hope to now finish and use for various other projects (and yes, eventually open source).

The second objective was to finish a literary experiment I had started several years before during the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) initially at the behest of my good friend Craig Welsh. This was a story written through blog posts similar to the “Briefroman” or Letter novels of the 18th-19th century. I never finished it and it is these characters which became the central pieces of the Tweet Rhapsody. In addition, the great thing about the Briefromane was that they did not ignore the fact that the letters were important to the story, quite the opposite in fact. I wanted to make Twitter not just the medium, but indeed, part of the story. In other words the story might happen in Twitter-space but could not have happened without the characters being aware of Twitter itself.

The third reason was that I wanted to have a running commentary on issues in both Sri Lanka and Canada and show the similarities of the two countries rather than the large obvious differences. I am of the Sinhalese majority by birth but I long for the day that all the peoples of that island nation are brought together in peace, no more than I wish for the eventuality where there is no discrimination between the English, French and Aboriginal Peoples of Canada. In Sri Lanka yet, the divisions are very deep and my hope is in the possibility of friendships of the type displayed by Raj and David in the Tweet Rhapsody.

The last reason is that I am a closet romantic and I kind of liked the idea or seeing whether this format could actually make people believe in six characters enough to follow them through to the bitter end.

You may or may not know that this week concludes my initial experiment into using Twitter, and indeed any online communication service to write a novella. I’ve been meaning to blog about all this for a while, but when I came up with the idea I was working for Sun Microsystems and within the same span of time (12 weeks) that the Tweet Rhapsody ran for, I have quit my job and gone on a three-week vacation. As you might imagine, my blogging kind of went out the proverbial window!

So what and why is the Tweet Rhapsody. First, I am not the first to use Twitter to write a story. Frankly do a Google search and you will discover that there are many Twitter novels. A lot of them come from Asia. Where I might be the first is how I used Twitter to tell the story. Instead of a single Twitter account spouting out 140-character lines from a story, the Tweet Rhapsody was six individuals on Twitter, their individual Tweets would make up the story.

Essentially the Tweet Rhapsody is a collection of Tweets which when read in a specific order bring up a an extended story over the 12 weeks. You could read it on the web site, or you could search for #tweetrhapsody on Twitter and follow the story. Either option worked.

There are many problems with this method of storytelling. First and foremost, the problem with writing a conversational story is that there is almost no background information presented to the reader. In fact the reader has to imagine and make up much of the background story from little snippets of conversation.

A second problem came from the fact that not only was it conversational, it had to be delivered in the Twitter format of 140 characters. Woah. The third problem was that I wanted this to be fast and quick, so I divided each week into a chapter and each chapter into “Tweetisodes” that last only a day. To add more misery to the writer (i.e. me) I also decided that there was to be no more than 40 Tweets and a minimum of 25 Tweets per Tweetisode. I had to hook and tell people a story with 25-40 lines per day from any of six characters told as a story.

This is not easy. I am very curious to know whether I succeeded.

I then added a further complication to the whole thing. I wanted the Tweet Rhapsody to be written as *fast* as humanly possible. To that end each Tweetisode was written at the most two weeks in advance and there was to be next to no editing. This was basically a write-once, post-immediate exercise. The only exception I made to this rule was that I chose one friend, two at the most, to see the Tweetisodes before they were posted.

So thank you very much Delphine and Meghan.

I had developed a skeletal story for the Tweet Rhapsody but I wanted the story to evolve in relative real time. When an event happened in either of the two countries that the story is set in (Canada or Sri Lanka) I made reference and even wove it into the main fabric of the story. Events such as Michael Jackson’s death could not be ignored. The idea was to make the Tweet Rhapsody as living a conversation as possible. The characters do not inhabit some fantasy land they needed to be part of our fabric of existence complete with weather and news.

This also meant one more restriction. While I knew the relative path of the story I could not write the story more than a week in advance at the later stages. This worked very well until I had to go on vacation to the wilds of Newfoundland and Labrador and discovered that finding an internet connection when required was not always as easy as it could have been.

I have now posted Tweetisodes from airports, train stations, hotels, bus stations, the lobby of restaurants, poaching free wireless from unlocked routers and a whole host of friends houses, cafe’s and what not.

So the end result? 37,000 words over 12 weeks broken into 12 chapters with well over 2,000 tweets.

On Friday September 11, the initial story comes to an end.