Do you write fiction and aspire to be the next Raymond Carver or Paul Auster? Are you hoping to one-day land a book deal with a large publishing house? Being a published author is an admirable dream, but you can look beyond publishing houses and even print-on-demand services and create your own fictional story using social media tools.

Proving that there is more that one way to tell a good story, Penguin Books are using Twitter, blogs, Flickr accounts and googlemaps to adapt classic stories for the web.

The team behind the adaptations are, SixToStart who previously worked on the alternate reality game, Perplex City. This week’s story is “Slice“, which is based on the book, Haunted Dolls’ House and Other Ghost Stories.

If you’re a writer, think about how you could use social media tools to spread the word about your writing and gain a loyal following.

Using social media tools would be like writing an epistolary novel where the story is fragmented over various media and the audience has to piece it back together again. Here’s a brief definition of an epistolary novel:

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic “documents”, such as blogs and e-mails have also come into use. The word epistolary comes from the word epistle, meaning a letter.

Think about the wealth of tools and applications that are available today. How could you tell a story with social media tools? Here are just a few examples:

Twitter
You could use Twitter and have conversations between characters or even with your audience. How about using Twitter to write short short stories like Ernest Hemingway? (Thanks to Paul from Insight Buzz for reminding me about this story in our comments section previously.)

Location based/Mobile
If your story takes place in a particular location then you could use a service like the excellent, Socialight.com. When an audience member reaches a certain location they’ll have a message sent to their mobile phone giving them more details about the character or the location. What if Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy or George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London was told to you as you actually visited the places described in their books?

Blogs
For longer pieces of prose you can use blogs. If you’re feeling really brave then why not allow your audience decide what happens to your characters or plot? There are a number of different poll plugins and extensions for content management systems that you could use. You can also use the feedback from your comments to see what aspects of the story your audience is most interested in.

Social networks
Although many alternate reality games have used MySpace and Facebook before, you could use them to give each character more depth. You could use them to show who your character is friends with and to give them a little more background information.

If you’re a writer, then think beyond paper and pen and experiment with social media tools to create a great story and reach a new audience. Whatever you do, don’t create lots of new accounts and jump in straight away. Take the time to look over the excellent work by SixtoStart and Penguin before you create your masterpiece across the web.

What other social media tools could you use to tell a story? Leave your comments below.