28. Tweet a Tale

A Twitter-sized Tale, 140 characters long (including spaces) where one is encouraged to think about what you want to say and get at the heart of the matter, perhaps has Robert Lowell turning in his grave and the Haiku feeling a tad abandoned. Terribly Tiny Tales, a veritable new genre has taken the social media by storm with their succinct yet momentous tales. A passionate team of vivacious young creative writers in the summer of 2013, launched this offbeat concept on Facebook, in response to the contemporary “unintelligent content” as MariyaGabajiwala from TTT calls it. Since then, the venture has come a long way and has over 500,000 likes on Facebook alone, besides other popular social media. Its ‘less is more’ concept has unquestionably managed to strike a chord with the right audience and the TTT has indeed carved a niche for itself in the current literary domain. So we decided on a tiny tête-à-tête with Mariya.

Q: How did you chance upon this concept of Terribly Tiny Tales?

A: The idea behind Terribly Tiny Tales wasn’t really ‘chanced upon’. Back when the Facebook page went live - the summer of 2013 - collective attention spans were at an ever-steady decline and online timelines were cluttered with spammy, unintelligent content (including bathroom selfies, cat memes, and the likes).Creative expression took a backseat in the grand scheme of things - making it a particularly frustrating and difficult time for creative individuals. Terribly Tiny Tales was a natural response to this. And like any good product, it borrowed the best from the worse - creating something that was truly unique and filled a need-gap.

Q: What is your idea of an ‘alternate reality’?

A: Coincidentally, this is something we actually talk about at our micro-fiction workshops. We believe that an ‘alternate reality’ exists right here, parallel to our own - hiding in plain sight: a world of wonderment, magic, insights and stories. To experience it or to visit it, all one has to do is look. In more ways than one, observation is a writer’s (either aspiring or established) greatest asset - to see an alternate reality that others simply don’t.

Q: Writing always addresses a social cause but by doing your stories online only, does it not limit the target audience? Or was it deliberate to cater to a particular kind of readership?

A: There are very few ‘always’ with writing. And today, wouldn’t not doing stories online drastically limit the target audience? These days, the world is so entwined - stories are where the readers are, and the readers are where the stories are. The conversations, collaborations, and agility that the online medium allows is unsurpassed - as long as the medium is respected yet pushed to its limits and turned to its head.

Q: Since writing has become such a competitive space, how and where do you see yourselves 5 years from now? Would you continue writing in a soft medium like blogging or enter the publishing arena? What is your long term plan?

A: There’s over-saturation in almost every field. But good content always, always survives. Great writing is its own biggest advertiser. And good stories automatically allure and attract audiences. And that’s our aim - to ever-strive to tell great human stories, continue to explore insights and truths, and become a platform to countless eager, hungry voices. Future-proofing ourselves against the many challenges, we’re building technologies, too - with our audiences and stellar content at its heart.