Cell Phone Novels, the Biology Behind ‘The Tortured Genius’ and How Yawning Can Up Your Creativity

I came across a few interesting things in my reading this week – not least of which was an article in the Huffington post this week exploring a new reading phenomenon in Japan – Cell Phone Novels. Sound weird? They certainly are – they sit somewhere between the poetic concision of a haiku and the manic social gracelessness of a tweet – but that said the most popular text novel, It's Your Fault (Kimi no Sei) by Sakura Imo, has been read 17 million times. That’s not half bad for a few texts. It turns out that five of the top ten novels in Japan were cell phone novels as far back as 2007 - and that's when screens were so small that chapters couldn’t be more than 200 words!

17 million readers - that's a lot of cell-phones

I’m not quite excited enough by the concept to start condensing chapters of my work-in-progress for cell-phone use, but I thought it might be worth trying out a chapter. If you’re short of inspiration this week why not have a go at writing a 200 word cell-phone ready piece of flash fiction? Or, failing that, try incorporating the idea into a poem or story - perhaps as a speculative glimpse of the future. If you really get going with it, you can start syndicating your text-novels via the website textnovel.com or the app eMobo.

I also came across an interesting article by Edward Platt about the phenomenon of ‘The Tortured Genius,’ which focusses on a study by the University of Graz in Austria. Austrian scientists found that the ability to come up with new ideas is often related to activity in the precuneus, a part of the brain that usually only operates when one is resting and unstimulated. Writers and creative types often have a precuneus that fires off all the time – regardless of whether or not they’re ‘at rest’. Platt thinks this makes for the irritability and moodiness that’s dogged the larger part of the artistic canon - and while Platt doesn’t come up with a short-cut to get your precuneus up and running, I had a look around for ideas and found an article by a UPenn director and scientist, Andrew Newburg, who recommends a regime of constant yawning:

“My advice is simple. Yawn as many times a day as possible: when you wake up, when you’re confronting a difficult problem at work, when you prepare to go to sleep, and whenever you feel anger, anxiety, or stress. Yawn before giving an important talk, yawn before you take a test, and yawn while you meditate or pray because it will intensify your spiritual experience.”

Hokey? Maybe, but anything in the name of art, right? I’ll report back if it helps.

A portrait of the artist at work

One ABC writer who doesn’t need any extra inspiration - yawn-inspired or otherwise - is Celticman, who continues to astound me with his prolific output of high-quality fiction. This week he posted a polished version of a piece we workshopped months ago in an ABCtales critique session, along with a sequel, and they’re both fantastic, so our Stories of the Week are the first two segments of ‘Uncovering Oneself,’ a dark, psychological portrait of a young alcoholic struggling to find his feet. Novelistic reading of the highest standard (though we’re all still hanging by a thread to see the final chapters of his ‘School Photos’).

And our poem of the week is Lavadis’ Cyclops. I love when Lavadis posts a new piece because I know it’s going to rewire the whole textual-response system in my imagination – he always poses a serious challenge to the Precuneus and this poem doesn’t fail to rise to it. My Mother was a Cyclops is a surreal, dark portrait of a man's relationship with his mother, and it’s filled with images that, once processed, won’t be leaving your head anytime soon.