My recent post on Zadie Smith’s essay on essays highlighted the strange tension between fiction, and what it does and doesn’t seem to be doing for us – denizens as we are of a restless, confused age. Well, there is clearly something in the air, because here is proof that the novel is not quite dead – despite what the CEO of Borders might think – yet:
Noveller, the online macroblogging service that lets users post their impromptu narrative ruminations on modern life, society, and the nature of existence itself, celebrated its millionth post late last week, officially making it the world’s most popular prose-sharing tool…
“You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them,” cofounder Chuck Gregory said. “To be honest, we were stunned there wasn’t already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious.”…
At 10 a.m. Pacific time on Mar. 13, Gregory and his team of programmers launched Noveller. By 10:03 a.m., the first-ever Noveller post—a primitive but vigorous account of an insurance salesman who becomes obsessed with his father’s boyhood on a Philippines naval base—was put up by user johnnyK_67.
Within an hour, more than 300 user-generated “Novels” had been posted.
“I love it,” said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. “If I’m ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people.”
But according to the Onion, not everyone is so sure…
“Nobody wants to go to their computer and read about what you had for breakfast and how it called to mind your boyhood, which morphed into a meditation on the relationship between life and art and, by extension, a metaphor for all social interaction,” said Sam Alger, 24, who claimed to be “disgusted” by his friends’ constant Novelling. “But some of them, it’s all they do. It’s like no one just talks to you for hours and hours on end any more.”
Watch this space, novel-lovers! (Coming soon: more on Borders. And Cyril Connolly.)
5 Comments
November 27, 2009 at 12:26 am
“You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them.”
Wasn’t there always e-mail? Or blogs?
Like I said… mania, complete mania! The Ghost of Lit-Crit-Yet-To-Come will be laughing its head off… However the Ghost of Even-Futurer-Lit-Crit will be rubbing its hands in salivating joy.
November 27, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Dear Katy
If I had a brilliant idea for a novel, I’d either keep it to myself or offer it to the highest bidder. Plagiarism is rife enough already without making it even easier.
Best wishes from Simon
November 27, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Guys, you know it’s a spoof, right?
November 27, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Tomorrow, Saturday, there’s going to be a man – the radio called him a ‘well-known comedian’ – standing on a pile of books in Westfields, Shepherd’s Bush, and constructing a novel out of sentences that passing shoppers throw at him. Democracy, innit, or accessibility or something. Blunt sentences or sharp ones, either will do.
November 27, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Charles! Thanks for that tidbit. Funny isn’t it with sentences how, exactly as with knives, the blunt ones hurt more going in.
Are you going?