This was brought to my attention by Slate, which Tweeted that it was “The best Twitter story you’ll read all day.”
The tale to which the message linked more than lived up to that modest standard. As Slate noted, “this shaggy dog story shows how hospitable the medium is to old-fashioned front-porch (or bar-room) storytelling.”
This is not literature, but it shows how someone can tell an engaging, amusing, fairly involved story in much the way one would just sitting around with friends, at less than 140 characters at a time.
The story is told by protagonist Erin Faulk (@erinscafe) of Glendale, CA. She is apparently telling it in a bar, between rounds of beer. You can read it in its entirety here, including Tweets interjected by her readers following the story — just as friends might do hearing the story told in person.
It’s a pretty good little shaggy dog story, which begins, “I will now tweet about the time I tried to find Matt Damon in Morocco.”
It takes her 55 more Tweets (or 56; I sort of lost count and I’m not going to start over) to get the job done. Toward the end, some readers were interjecting that they were up past their bedtimes, but had to see how it ended.
This mild picaresque tale will not rock your world or anything. But it’s interesting, as an example of something you might not have realized you could do with Twitter…
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