The epic centre

Honestly, this wasnt my idea. I just rolled with it.

Late last July, in the midst of a busy workday, my colleague Bronwen turned to me.

Chindu, have you seen this?

What?

This article about mobile fiction.

It was about amateur novels being read as SMS on mobile phones. Apparently, Japanese teenagers were crazy about it. Bronwen sent more news. While the Japanese were, umm, thumbing through portable novels, elsewhere a very determined bunch was making its way through similar bursts of fiction, on Twitter.

A new genre of narrative was emerging, a different kind of storytelling, on platforms that discouraged the traditional format. This was fiction-to-go, for the tech-savvy audience, for the smartphone addict.

And this audience was growing, demanding more micro-content; it was only a matter of time before we produced micro versions of everything we put up on, well, the old new media.

The question then was: what kind of narrative will work on micro-blogs, and mobile sites? How should it be structured so readers stay with a story delivered in episodes?

The best way to find out was to dive in. Soon enough, I was reading Prem Panickers Bhimsen, a reimagining of the Mahabharata. The tale was perfect for the experiment.

For one, it provided plenty of dramatic tensionsurely that should hold the reader. There was also the irony of fitting the worlds longest and arguably most philosophical epic into a micro-blogging site meant to keep your friends updated about your non-activities (am in shower. shoot, phone got wet). Plus, I really liked the Mahabharata.

And so began the target="_blank">Epicretold. The first tweet had six-year-old Bhima standing wide-eyed at the Hastinapur palace, staring at the lady with the black cloth over her eyes, disturbed, scared, but unable to look away.

A week later, he had his first confrontation with Duryodhana: He is taller, bigger, but I am strongerborn to the forest, not to palace maids. I leave him against the wall.

In the months since, Bhima has captured quite some media attention, including that from the Time. Importantly, the new new media has taken off: applications like Kobo, Stanza bring fiction to your mobile, publishers put out Twitter versions of the new work, the news media has climbed the mobile bandwagon (mostly with shovelwareshame!), and armchair academics like me are paid to research topics such as episodic storytelling in the digital world.

Excuse me, I need to go now. Bhima is about to kill Baka.

The author is Lecturer at The Media School, Bournemouth University

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