what is cell phone novel?

h3llo. I got a little bored, so I decided to tell you about the so-called "Cell Phone Novel".

Cell Phone Novel or Mobile Phone Novel/Novel for a Mobile Devices (Japanese: 携帯小説: keitai shosetsu) - this is a type of literature that appeared in the early 2000s in Japan, the first country to embrace the joys of mobile phones.

(A bit of historical background: in Japan in the late 90s, messaging via pagers became popular among teenagers, mobile devices were held in higher esteem by young people than regular paper books, and all this led to the emergence of their own type of literature.)

The first novel in this form was published in 2003 and was called "Deep Love". Subsequently, such novels spread beyond Japan, throughout Asia, as well as to some European countries, such as Germany, China, South Africa, and the United States. By 2007, 98 mobile novels had been printed, and 5 out of 10 printed novels in Japan were originally mobile novels. In 2008, the first mobile novel in English, "Secondhand Memories", was published. The main difference between such novels and regular ones is that they:

1. Chapters in mobile novels are very small, 50/70-100/150/200 words, due to the technical characteristics of old phones.

2. Abbreviations, colloquial and lapidary/simple style of speech are present.

3. In general, minimalistic text

4. Hyphenations and indents. One sentence can be a whole paragraph. And also a sentence can break off and be transferred to the next line

5. Lack of poetic writing style.

Well, perhaps... I will also tell you how to write novels in this style:

Stage 0 (optional). Read other mobile novels to better understand their structure and get inspired by them, for example: Deep Love, Secondhand Memories, Koizora/Sky of Love, etc.

Stage 1. Decide on the topic of your novel. Mobile novels are usually written by young women and deal with themes of love, depression, rape, pregnancy, love triangles, etc. This does not mean that you should only write about them, they are just the most popular topics.

Step 2. Having decided on a topic, you need to understand if you like it? Does it captivate you? Does it make you think about something? How interesting and long can you write about it? etc.

Step 3. Create an approximate title for your novel. If you don’t know which one to choose, just use a novel title generator. There are many of them and they are all free

Step 4. Write the story itself. The main thing to remember is that while classic novels are published when they are already completely written, mobile novels are published chapter by chapter. Here we have two options for writing it. The first is Traditional. With it, you completely describe the entire story, divide it into chapters and publish it. The second is generally accepted. With it, you only come up with characters and write the story on the fly, without a specific script, using only the characters' personalities.

Stage 5. Text formatting. You can experiment with it as you wish. Place the text on the left or in the middle, sentences can be carried over to the next line, in the middle, the distance between paragraphs/sentences can be different, you can also use the  s p a c i n g b e t w e e n c h a r a c t e r s, italics, underlining, bold text, etc. It is important to remember that you should not overload the chapters with these techniques, it is better to use them less often.

Stage 6. Publish your works on Wattpad, Textnovel, Spacehey and other sites, offers, social networks.

That's all. I hope it was interesting and useful for you ^^.