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It is common for novels to inspire films or films to inspire games -and vice versa- but cellphones inspiring novels? It’s already happening in Japan, and in fact last year novel downloads that were written on cellphones and are read on cellphones have outsold traditional print publications! And not only that, the more popular forms of those successfully make it to print form. Five of last year’s print top ten -including the top three- were originally cellphone novels!

The writers are typically young women that can type really quickly with their thumbs on their tiny cellphone keyboards. Most writers and readers belong to a generation that grew up with a cellphone planted in their hand and consider it an extension of their body. In fact, it is not uncommon for young people to feel more at comfort with a cellphone than with a computer, as it can be carried and used everywhere, even at places where no other activity is possible, the metro, waiting for the bus…

The nature of cellphone keyboards is such that the writing style is unavoidably very different to that written with a full scale keyboard of a desktop or laptop. Syntax is not strict, expressions tend to be simpler and the overall experience is very different to what we experience with a traditional novel. For this reason, cellphone novels were initially criticised as being of poor quality and having undeveloped characters. This however did not deter readers to download and pay for such creations, a trend that resulted in today’s -possibly and originally unintentional- success. Like all new trends, there were certain prerequisites that allowed the evolution of the new writing form:

1. It all started in 2000 when Maho no i-rando, a then home page design web page, noticed that users liked to write novels in their blogs and therefore allowed them to upload serialised novels for readers to comment on. The whole thing caught on and other online services followed, Goma Books being another well known one.
2. Up to around 2004, fanatical Japanese cellphone novel readers were charged by data volume and their monthly bills run in the hundreds of dollars. The real breakthrough came when in order to match market trends Docomo and its competitors introduced a flat monthly rate for all cellphone data use. The consequence was booming data use and reasonable prices for the new novels.

Cellphone novels are in their nature much like their manga counterparts. They are action packed, exaggerated and talk about intense feelings like love, hate and friendship. They are also very violent and sexually explicit, therefore finding fertile ground in Japanese readers that are already ideally accustomed to this style. After recent sales successes, critics concentrate their complaints in the lower literary complexity relative to traditional novels and suggest that a new category should be created, as it already happens with comics and popular music. Practise tells otherwise, as it is very easy and common for cellphone novel writers to change medium and as they mature -in age, writing style and story telling- they start writing using traditional keyboards. As cellphones evolve to gain larger screens and more comfortable -possibly full- keyboards, it is certain that the cellphone novel will stay with us and will hopefully be exported from Japan to other countries…

Link: New York Times