New York, Dec. 6: When Mr Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the website Figment with Ms Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set.
“I really went into it and thought, ‘We’ll be the social network for young-adult fiction’,” said Mr Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker. “But it became clear early on that people didn’t want a new Facebook.”
The young people on the site weren’t much interested in “friending” one another. What they did want, he said, “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself”.
Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cell phones.
Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.
The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cell phone novel, which arrived in the US around 2008. That December, Mr Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. — NYTNS