by Arcadia Hudson

Created on: December 18, 2008

The cell phone may soon become the prolific writer's nxt BFF. Every year, new cell phone models come out designed to make it easier to listen to music, watch video, and surf the internet; so it seems natural that the next step would be having novels available on mobile phones as well. Taking it further, some want to do more than just read novels on their phone. They want to write them.

Keitai Shosetsu

This kind of cell phone novel got its start in Japan. In 2003, a young writer named Yoshi wrote a novel on his cellphone entitled "Deep Love." He wrote parts of it at a time by writing paragraphs in text messages and then sending them to a website that allowed others to read his posts. His novel became so popular that eventually a hard copy was published, and he sold 2.6 million copies in Japan. It also was adapted as a movie, television series, and a graphic novel.

Fast forward to 2007: five of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were cell phone novels put into print, and the trend is spreading to other countries, such as China, Korea, and Finland. In the summer of 2007, Italian science fiction writer Roberto Bernocco wrote a 384 page science fiction novel in 17 weeks with a Nokia 6630 cell phone, which lacks a qwerty keypad. Although he wrote with text messages, Bernocco used full Italian grammar without any IM abbreviations.

From there comes the question of what is a real cell phone novel. Is it a novel that's written on a computer and is then sent to cell phones, or is it a novel written on a cell phone to begin with?

A "Novel" Concept

Either way you look at it, the thought of writing that much on a cell phone is probably making some people's fingers ache at this very moment. However, when novels are written on cell phones, usually large portions are not written at a time. The novels are serialized, so they're read as they are written. It's like subscribing to watch episodes of your favorite T.V. show every week. Paragraphs are added a little at a time, and eventually there's a whole novel. There are a few advantages to this type of writing.

First of all, there's accessibility. Many writers today like typing their pieces. Being able to write on a cell phone allows work to be done on a story from anywhere. There's no need to carry around a laptop or fire up the computer just to quickly slip in that exciting idea that came in the middle of the night, which may only be a sentence long. Besides, sometime during the day there's bound to be a free moment-it could be in

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