After interviewing Sean Hill – the Austinite behind @VeryShortStory and a new collection of his 140-character stories in book form today – on Monday, I went to dinner with a friend of mine and had a spirited argument about whether a Tweet or a sentence can tell a whole story. She argues that a sentence is just a sentence, not a story.

Hill’s Twitter follower / famous author Margaret Atwood and I disagree.

For those who don't know, @VeryShortStory is a twitter feed with 94,000+ followers. Twitterers message Hill a noun that ends up in an enormous file on his computer, from which he picks his favorites and writes 140-character stories. These stories are often rather dark, in sharp contrast to the cheerful man I interviewed on the day before the world could purchase the book based on his feed: “Very Short Stories: 300 Bite-Size Works of Fiction.”

Even if you aren’t into (very) short stories, other reasons to continue reading this interview with Hill include: a love of original Austinites; an interest in improvisational theater; a penchant for experimental storytelling; and a curiosity about the latter-life careers of video game industry workers. It all ties back around to Hill’s decision in 2009 to launch @VeryShortStory as an experiment in bringing improv to Twitter.

Sean Hill, now 46, grew up in Texas but spent eight years of his prime in California in the computer game business. While hanging out in San Francisco roughly two decades ago, Hill went to an improv show and got hooked. He started to study and perform.

When he moved to Austin and founded his own video game company, he found the local improv scene lacking. So he started teaching and started his own theater in 1998 – The Hideout Theatre. Maybe you’ve heard of it, or seen it smack dab in the middle of downtown on Congress Avenue.

“When I moved here, they didn’t have that kind of improv, so I started the theater and started teaching,” Hill said. “Now we’ve gone from having one improv theater 10 years ago, to several and at least 300 improvisers here in town.”

Though he burned out on the gaming world, Hill stuck with improv and The Hideout. He sold the theater a couple years ago, but you may still catch Hill on stage at the Hideout, or Salvage Vanguard or Coldtowne Theater.

At this point in the story, Hill takes his computer background and storytelling experience he gained from video games and studying and performing improv, and turns to Twitter. In 2009, he launched @VeryShortStory to find out if he could bring the interactivity and on-the-spot storytelling of improv to social media.

“That’s why I ask people for a noun. I like that, that there’s some interactivity there,” Hill said. “I spent 10 years doing improv and making up stories on the spot, and I think that’s really where that skill comes from.”

Hill said his storytelling tweets also fulfill a need for quicker gratification than he got in the gaming industry, thanks to the lengthy lag time between idea and the introduction to the world of the story in game form.

“By the time you get done with the game, you’ve lost interest,” he said. “With Twitter, I can get a word and immediately write a story and get it back into the world. So I like that about writing online.”

And thousands of people online like his writing. The first major follower Hill remembers was @RainnWilson, aka Dwight from “The Office,” followed closely by burlesque leading lady @DitaVonTeese.

“I’ve been surprised how supportive people are,” Hill said. “It’s been so encouraging. Out of every 100 comments I get, 98 are positive.”

On top of the book of collected Tweets/stories coming out this week, Hill is also coming off of a mention by Margaret Atwood in a story encouraging the world to see the literary value in social media like Twitter. In her interview, she mentions how she just followed “the guy” who writes 140-character stories in Twitter. (“It would have been nice if she’d known my name, but I’m fine being ‘that guy on Twitter,’” Hill said.)

Hill is working his way up to writing full time, and is working on a book of comparatively monstrously long 250-word short stories and some children’s books. But the Twitter feed lives on.

“Part of it in the beginning was, I was curious to see if I’ve run out of ideas. And so far I haven’t,” he said. “At this point, I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think writer’s block is worrying about the results before you write them, and I think my improv training has gotten me out of that.

“Sometimes I write a story that I think isn’t the best in the world, but I send it out into the world to make room for the next one – it’s like improve: sometimes it’s okay, sometimes it sucks and sometimes it’s magic.”

Find "Very Short Stories: 300 Bite-Sized Works of Fiction" at BookPeople.

Follow @VeryShortStory on Twitter