from the followers who witnessed the birth of Twivortiare

RT @mya_ramayanti: Divortiare punya daya hisap luar biasa. Dan akun sebelah obat paling mujarab untuk rasa penasaran akan ending-nya.

RT @sellyzevania: I love Alex and Beno, their love-hate relationship, how they can be whom they really are, how marriage is not as smooth as in the TV show, and how love did conquer all. Finger cross, mereka nggak cerai lagi! :)

RT @iiphche: Baca TL @alexandrarheaw berasa baca cuplikan kisah someone yg bener-bener ada & selalu nagih ngikutinnya. Terlebih dia juga balas-balas mention.

RT @meiisme: Akun @alexandrarhea2 itu feels so real, like I know Alex, Beno, Wina, Mbok in person.  Bahkan sampai naksir Beno ​”̮ нiнiнi “̮

RT @laxxmita: Twivortiare bikin gue percaya kalau mereka real & sampai gue cari itu nama Dokter Beno di web-web RS haha. Dan selalu bikin gue kepo tingkat durjana!

RT @sibocil: Having so much fun with @alexandrarheaw twit just like real story. Very entertaining. Kadang buat ketawa, sedih, gregetan & penasaran.

RT @beccalovesgreen: They’re both so adorable even when they fight,cant stop reading about them,I always scroll to the bottom to pick up where i left

RT @iMutiara: @ikanatassa Mrs Beno Wicaksono’s tweets somehow feel real & honest, shows us about the up(s) & down(s) in marriage life & how she handle it.

RT @asrimayasari: Having @alexandrarheaw in my TL everyday is like reading someone’s life diary but never get bored & annoyed and…I love Beno :p

RT @_hida_: Alexandra & Beno itu bikin gemes. Yang satu terlalu lempeng, yang satu ribut mulu karena kelempengan pasangannya.. Tapi ya gitu saling cinta juga.. :)))

RT @olalalia: Gue tau itu novel, tapi gue merasa itu real.  Menghidupkan sosok fiksi ke Twitter, membuat kita merasa dia nyata dan ada di dekat kita.

RT @irmainar: Follow @alexandrarheaw pas masih 60an follower-nya, saya mikir itu beneran nyata. I love the way you create a character, Mbak Ika :)

RT @chubbycheek: Follow Alex + Beno’s life, selalu bikin penasaran, mulai dari happy, kesel, gregetan karena sikap mereka berdua, they look like real not just a fiction.

RT @tiasanisundari: Karena pikiran-pikiran Alex itu bisa bikin mikir, especially when Alex and Beno face daily problems like any couples would have. Feels real.

RT @virhaaan: Gw follow @alexandrarheaw karena gue suka banget tokoh Alex dibuat as real as possible! Dengan karakter wanita ceplas ceplos tapi buat ketawa & greget.

RT @uchyggreany: Follow @alexandrarheaw bener-bener ngebuat imajinasi kita tentang Divortiare lengkap dan seakan-akan berada di dlm real life bersama mereka

RT @indahchana: Bikin geregetan! Jadi ikut larut sama emosinya. Its so real. Aku juga merasa jadi temennya, meski cuma temen fiksi. :p

RT @BiancaSyafina: Hadirnya Twitter @alexandrarheaw itu ibarat bertemu sahabat cewek baru yang smart, funny, dan punya banyak cerita seru.

RT @rsgabrielle: Because she seems real and like any other woman, her life is full with ups and downs which makes us curious.

RT @riantikarafni: Selalu penasaran nunggu update tweet-nya. Kreatif banget! Lebih seru karena seperti nyata dan kita bisa interaksi langsung sama si tokoh :D

dare we say ‘twitterature’?

I can’t remember what got me to do this in the first place, but one morning, this thing hit my head: hey, what if a character that I’ve created in one of my books has a twitter account?  What she/would say?  

Well, to say I had too much time in my hand or that I was bored at that time is probably not far from the truth.  So yes, that morning of January 23rd, I set up a Twitter account under the name of @alexandrarheaw, tweeting as Alexandra Wicaksono, the female lead in my 2nd book Divortiare.

I didn’t promote that thing first, I just tweeted once in a while, and suddenly I realized that it was growing followers.  And you know what, some started speculating that Alexandra was real.  That the book that I wrote a few years back was about this one real woman.  So before it got carried away, one day I just tweeted in my personal account @ikanatassa that now they can follow @alexandrarheaw as the spin-off of Divortiare.  Well, whaddayaknow, at the time I wrote this, the @alexandrarheaw got some twelve-hundreds followers.  Which for me, is kinda … wow.

What’s more wow, though, is how the followers - in this case, my readers - react to the tweets.  They ask questions, they comment, they express their emotions towards some of the things that I tweeted as if this Alexandra character is a real person, and suddenly I’m in this weird, cosmic, unfathomable interactive relationships with the followers.  Which is totally new for me.  I didn’t even know that their comments and questions could actually lead me to making up stories as we go.  At one point, I think I got really really creative that I said to myself ‘I can’t believe I’m tweeting this shit but it’s fun.’  @alexandrarheaw’s tweets, like all Twitter ramblings, are plotless, spontaneous, chaotic, just like how a normal, living person lives his/her life.

What amuses me more is that some followers actually took the liberty of creating their own spin-off Twitter account.  Before I know it, now the husband is tweeting, the best friend is tweeting, hell even the housemaid of the character is tweeting.  Which I found hilarious.  And I don’t mind, really, hey if one Twitter account that I started could ignite others to explore their own creativity, why not?

I personally don’t know if this is going to be a trend now or in the future.  You know, the whole an author tweeting his/her story instead of writing it in a book.  A couple of other people have done something called ‘twitterature’ - a smart amalgamation of ‘twitter’ and ‘literature’, don’t you think?  In it, these two guys, Achman and Rensin,  wrote humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer.  I bought and read the book, and I must say, I quite enjoy how Hamlet was tweeting, Harry Potter was tweeting, Anna Karenina was tweeting, and a whole bunch more.

And didn’t ‘Shit My Dad Says’ start from @shitmydadsays?

And then there’s this article in Time magazine - ‘Twitter Lit: A New Creative Outlet’ - in which they explained how writers are shaping their work to exploit technology.  Which is actually kinda true.  Authors used to write on stones, leaves, paper, and now we’re writing on our laptops and iPads.

Personally, I don’t know what I would call this whole new me who’s now tweeting her work instead of writing it into a book.  Well, there’s always a choice to publish the collection of these tweets into a book one day, maybe sooner than I thought.  But for now, I’m just enjoying tweeting.  Twitter is often blamed as the primary cause why writers can’t write.  I’m just trying to prove the opposite, and have fun doing it.