Web Site for Teenagers With Literary Leanings

When Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the Web site Figment with Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr. Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set.

The young people on the site weren’t much interested in “friending” one another. What they did want, he said, “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself.”

http://figment.com/ will be unveiled today as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site.

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The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it “the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age.”

“We wanted people to be able to write whatever they wanted in whatever form they wanted,” Mr. Lewis said. “We give them a piece of paper and say, ‘Go.’ ” He added that so far contributions had included fantasy, science fiction, biographical work and long serial novels. “There’s a very earnest and exacting quality to what they’re doing.”

Several publishers have already signed on. Running Press Kids, a member of the Perseus Books Group, will provide an excerpt from “Purple Daze,” a historical novel for teenagers written by Sherry Shahan. (Figment charges a small fee to publishers for the privilege.)