Review: Tweetheart (The Tweeting Novel)

A bit different to regular printed book is a tweeting novel. I only heard about this today. It is titled "TweetHeart". Tweetheart is a novel written by 140 character tweets and published live on Twitter by Journalist Doug Sovern.

The tweets started on the 1st January 2011 and are said to finish on the 11th November 2011. The Author is using Twitter in a way to share the story with the world as Twitter seems to be the best source for it.

With the tweets that have come in so far, I find it brilliant and very touching.

The Story:
TweetHeart is the story of Zoe, a young woman living on the streets of Berkeley, California. The story follows her as she becomes estranged from those close to her and starts to live a dangerous live on the streets. She uses twitter to communicate with her friends and family, similar to an online diary, sharing her deep thoughts, troubles and decisions. She talks about life, men, her parents, stepmother and her dog and while you get a sense of who she is, you can also see her spiraling out of control as the days go by. In the beginning she is like any other person and just like any book, you get the chance to hear the story of how things went wrong.
As the story isnt finished, there is still more to come....

In the middle of writing this, today's tweets are going live:

My thoughts:

While it is fictional, when you begin to read through the tweets, you can feel the emotion and pain. It is as though by using twitter, we suddenly become closer with Zoe as its not a book in our hands, but a live account where we eagerly wait to see what happens next. I can feel her pain and while I read through what she has to say, I have the urge to help her. I think the way the author decided to approach her story is brilliant as it feels more real. I have heard of several teenagers using Twitter to share their emotions and drama in their lives and this fits right in, just another girl having a tough time, looking for an outlet to express herself.

Behind the Story:

It is based loosely on a real person that was close to the author. On his website, he mentions that it was based on his significant other that fell into a spiral of substance abuse, mental illness and homelessness. Sadly, she did not survive it. He is using the tweeting novel to share the fictionalized version of her story, as if she has been around during our time when social networking is at its highest.

You can read the entire story on the website.

Or you can follow the story on the official Twitter.
The NextWeb review.