Fiction by phone

Sara Schmidt is a published author. But you won't find her work on any bookshelf.

Schmidt, a 24-year-old Southeast Missouri State University student, writes and edits articles for Youth Noise, an online site whose mission is to empower young adults to better the planet.

She recently wrote a novella, "Ghost Town," which focuses on a homeless high school football player named Ghost.

Each of the eight characters in the novella has a back story on the Youth Noise Web site further explaining the characters, and each has a profile on the MySpace Web site.

Readers participated in online polls concerning the characters' actions.

Schmidt even wrote Internet blogs for each character. "People thought they were real people," she said.

But it was all fiction. Schmidt, of Fenton, Mo., said she interviewed homeless children and Rick Koca, founder of California-based StandUp for Kids, before writing the story. StandUp for Kids is an organization set up to help homeless children.

Schmidt, who has been writing for Youth Noise since 2003, said she was asked by her boss to write a novella as part of RE*Generation, an effort by YouthNoise and Virgin Mobile USA to call attention to teen and young-adult issues.

"Ghost Town" was RE*Gen¿eration's first major project. Virgin Mobile donated part of the proceeds to YouthNoise and StandUp for Kids.

Starting in mid-August, episodes of the novella were sent twice a day to Virgin Mobile phone customers who signed up to receive the text.

Users signed up by texting "Ghost" to a certain number and then paying for the messages. Subscribers paid 5 cents per message or one cent if the user was on a promotional plan.

Each scene was about 160 characters long, enough to fit into a text message. About 10,000 young adults and teenagers received the story in text-message form over the course of about a month ending in mid-September.

"Using the language of text messages was the biggest writing challenge," said Schmidt, who worked with editors on the project. "We had to keep cutting and cutting and cutting."

Schmidt said that even conventional, two-line paragraphs were too long. "It was really hard to be so brief," she said. "We had to take out all the modifiers. Once it was down to the nitty gritty, then we had to change it to textspeak."

In the slang of textspeak, "U" stands for "you." The numeral 8 stands for "ate."

"It was a lot of fun," Schmidt said.

Dr. Robert Hamblin, an English professor at Southeast, hasn't read the novella but compared the text-message work to a modern-day serial novel.

While Hamblin isn't sold on text-message fiction -- "It sort of limits the literary possibilities," he said -- the form does offer a new avenue for writers to bypass the traditional publishing route.

Schmidt lived on campus at Southeast for two years. She wanted to be a high school English teacher.

But she ended up managing a restaurant in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. She became an online student and an increasingly committed writer.

Schmidt became pregnant in 2005 and switched her major to general studies so she could pursue a degree entirely online. She's scheduled to graduate in December.

A one-time intern for YouthNoise, she worked her way up to a part-time writer position. In spring of this year, she was hired full time as an assistant editor.

Schmidt isn't surprised that today's teens, who have grown up with cell phones, are drawn to text-message literature. "They do a lot of things over the phone," she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123

On the Net

www.YouthNoise.com