Is a Tweet a Literary Genre?

The answer, like a well-written tweet, is short, and to the point:

Yes.

I’ll give you a little time to recover from the shock.

Literary means letters, as in letters of the alphabet. Tweets use letters. Emojis too, but primarily letters.

So why shock at all?

Because it’s assumed that any literary genre must ultimate appear in the form of a book.

Good old Gutenberg. His ghost is still haunting writers.

Sure, I’d like to have a book published. I’d like to write a manuscript, revise it, send it to a literary agent, who will find me a publisher, who will publish it and get me tens of thousands of readers. Millions maybe.

But that will not happen.

Meanwhile. I am actually a published writer. I have thousands of readers. Really. You won’t find my published writing unless you know my “pen name.” But it’s there, gaining readers every day.

The thing that I’ve had to come to terms with is that my publisher is not Simon and Schuster, or Routledge, or Penguin Books. My publisher is Twitter.

And that’s because my literary genre is the tweet.

If your don’t like that, go to hell.

Do I monetize my tweets? Sex workers and Google can monetize their tweets. I can’t, and I don’t.

But who becomes a writer to get monetized? If that’s what you want, you are already monetized, because you work for someone who pays you to write.

But I write to get readers, and that’s what Twitter gets me.

However, if anyone is reading this, he or she might well ask, what is this? This is certainly not a tweet. What is this literary genre?

The literary genre is the Medium piece.

Will it get readers?

I seriously doubt it.

It’s too long.

Two hundred eighty characters is already a very long piece. So far, here, I have written 1778.

So readers I do not expect.

So what?

It was fun writing it.

Now I need to get back to a serious literary genre.

I need to tweet.