Reading on the Small Screen

In case you missed it, The New York Times featured the latest fad from Japan — cellphone novels — on its front page recently. The gist of the piece was that cellphone novels republished as books have begun to dominate the best-seller lists in Japan. Five of the 10 best-selling novels of 2007 were originally cellphone novels. Twenty-one-year-old cellphone novelist Rin’s first novel sold 400,000 copies last year. “My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” she told the Times.

Will Americans soon be reading Grisham on their phones or getting weekly updates of the latest Stephen King novel via text message? We may laugh at the idea, but then again, I remember plenty of my fellow countrymen scoffing at the idea of Americans sending text messages nearly10 years ago, when the trend swept Japan.

Of course, the cellphone novel fad is followed by breathless pronouncements. The New York Times relates how Bungakukai, a literary journal, ran with this headline in its January issue: “Will Cellphone Novels Kill ‘The Author’?”

The answer, of course, is no, unless that author is writing Harlequin romances. The small screen is great for quick literary fixes. If I were any good at haiku, I’d be thinking about a “haiku of the day” service with my favorite phone company right now. But the screen has its limits, and it will never be the favored medium for the next novel by David Eggers or David Foster Wallace or Haruki Murakami.

Still, the small screen can be an interesting outlet for emerging writers. I guarantee publishers will be checking out the first English cellphone novels to appear. What better way for a fledgling writer to gain some attention for his or her work?

Good storytellers have a way of finding the right medium for their work. It’s all about matching the structure of the story to the medium. David Simon has had a long, successful career as a newspaper writer, but the pinnacle of his career is his 60-hour saga The Wire, which was made for TV. He and co-writer Ed Burns wanted to tell a story about how our institutions fail us. John Sayles had tried a similar approach in feature films, and while his movies are often great, they can’t recreate the complex web of urban life in 120 minutes. Simons and Burns do a spectacular job in part because they chose the right media for the story — instead of trying to tell the story of how Baltimore stopped working in a feature film for the big screen, they chose about 60 one hour segments spread over five seasons. It was the perfect structure for the story, and the result was our first “visual novel.”

Someone will come along and figure out how to tell a great story in English via the cellphone. Maybe it will be a poem, maybe a terse, first-person novel, or perhaps it will be a different sort of story that leaps onto the scene, announcing the arrival of a new literary talent. Scoff if you will, but no media is safe – no matter how small the screen – from the creative efforts of storytellers.