It seems as if David Mitchell, the author of intricate, metafictional, time-twisting novels like “Cloud Atlas,” might be drawn to Twitter, which, seen in a certain way, is a massive, ever-expanding, self-referential catalogue of modern thought. Yet in a recent interview with the BBC, he took a dimmer view: “I don’t want to add to this ocean of trivia and irrelevance; it’s already vast and deep enough.” Mitchell said this at the very same time that he was promoting a new Twitter project: an original short story, titled “The Right Sort,” which was published in a series of more than two hundred and eighty tweets in the course of a week, ending this past Sunday. He was plain about the fact that the idea had come from his publisher, as a way to generate excitement about Mitchell’s forthcoming novel, “The Bone Clocks.” Fair enough, but everything that Mitchell writes is worth reading, and his recent experiment suggests some of the possibilities, and the limitations, of Twitter fiction.
The story’s narrator is Nathan, a young British teen-ager who travels with his mother, a piano teacher, to the mysterious town house of a Lady Briggs for a party. Nathan’s been dragged along, and so, to ease his anxiety about the trip, he’s taken one of his mother’s Valium. “The Right Sort” begins as a story of adolescent angst, with Nathan preoccupied by thoughts about his outsiderdom; he recalls episodes of being bullied by his classmates at school, and is sharply aware of how out of place he and his mother, clumsy in a nervous middle-class way, feel at the house of an aristocrat. Nathan has a keen, deprecating wit. “Another boy around changes stuff. Who’s cooler? Who’s harder? Who’s cleverer? Who’s swottier? I’ll have to work it all out,” he ponders as he meets Jonah, who appears to be Lady Briggs’s son. It’s a voice that echoes, in its cadence and slangy brio, the twelve-year-old protagonist of Mitchell’s great bildungsroman “Black Swan Green,” from 2006.
Soon, however, the story takes a macabre, supernatural turn. Time changes speeds and nightmares seem to come to life as Nathan is hunted by a wild dog while his mother plays the piano for her host. Is it the Valium kicking in or, as in the coalescing surreality of an Edgar Allan Poe tale, something altogether more terrifying? Mitchell has always fearlessly mixed genre and literary fiction into a transcendent third thing; here he is working with the conventions of a horror story. “Knowing what’s impossible doesn’t change what’s actually true,” Nathan thinks as the story thrusts toward its climax, and he ventures into what has became a haunted house.
“The Right Sort” arrived in short bursts followed by long pauses. Mitchell sent out a batch of twenty consecutive tweets last Monday, spaced about a minute apart. Beginning the next day, he posted two batches of roughly twenty apiece, once in the morning and once at night. This timetable emphasized the story’s event-ness, but it offered little clear narrative or stylistic benefit. Not every batch ended in a cliffhanger, nor were twenty tweets always enough to give the story momentum. The best way to read the story was, ultimately, to wait until the whole thing was published. By Sunday night, you could go to Mitchell’s Twitter page and read it from the bottom up; or else you could follow a link from Sceptre Books, his publisher in the U.K., and read the tweets, reorganized for easier scrolling, from the top down.
Mitchell’s story is a traditional narrative published on Twitter rather than an example of a new genre of Twitter fiction. Some of the individual tweets stand apart, polished and self-contained. “Leaves blow down from an overhanging branch. There’s more leaves off than there are leaves left. October. The clocks go back tonight.” One serves as a clever piece of meta-commentary: “The pill’s just kicking in now. Valium breaks down the world into bite-sized sentences. Like this one. All lined up. Munch-munch.” But, mostly, the effect of reading was not feelings of disjunction and separation but rather one of surprising connection, a sense of disappearing into the scroll and the vortex of the story.
None of this has much to do with the liveliness or fluidity of Twitter, however. The same effect of reading consecutive tweets can be achieved by reading in any digital form, by zooming far in, blowing the text up to a large size, and then scrolling constantly and furiously along. It is an active and intimate experience, with the screen close to your face and your eyes close to the words, producing, perhaps for some, a more intense focus. Mitchell talked about this in an interview with the Guardian: “Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark.” This is an evocative description of the experience of reading on any screen.
If Twitter is to be more than a promotional tool, a delivery device, or a one-hand-behind-the-back challenge for fiction writers, then the full implications of the form need to be integrated into the writing itself. “Black Box,” a story by Jennifer Egan that was published by The New Yorker in 2012, first as a series of tweets and later in the magazine, was more successful on that score. Egan summarized the story as “a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea.” Many of the sentences fit comfortably, cool and with room to breathe; others pushed against the character limit, adding to the story’s dramatic tension. The writer Neil Gaiman has used Twitter to write collaborative stories with his fans. In January, Teju Cole published a short story, “Hafiz,” by retweeting lines that he had given other users and asked them to post.
There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention. Rather than just fiction tweeted, writers could find narrative in retweets, faves, blocks, and unfollows, and write in not just words but images, GIFs, emoji, and hyperlinks. Characters might exist as different Twitter handles, put in conversation, or else many characters subtly inhabiting a single account. It would wade into the messiness of parody accounts, anonymous mystery accounts, brand accounts, fake brand accounts, bots, and real people posing as bots. There are examples of this kind of writing, and its real emotional and intellectual possibilities, in the archive of work created for the Twitter Fiction Festival, which was held this past March: God tweets out a new book of the Bible about Justin Bieber; a cast of characters tweet about being trapped in a fictional airport during the polar vortex; Henry David Thoreau gets a smart phone at Walden Pond. Twitter is often funny, and so is Twitter fiction, but there are stories, too, of lost love, loneliness, and despair.
Writers may decide that Twitter is too narrow a space—too ephemeral, too rude or self-serving, too muddied by advertising and promotion—to both inspire and host meaningful fiction. Maybe everyone writing there is really still just gunning for a book deal. But I like to think that there is another kind of fiction to be written, the truest expression of the form, which embraces the quotidian nature of Twitter and its movements in real time. The project couldn’t be pre-written or announced; it would be spontaneous, changeable, full of odd tangents and breaking news and animal videos and sad, unfaved tweets. It would feature our first true @ narrator, writing in a voice that only seemed like unvarnished nonfiction opinion at the time. There may be someone out there already hard at work on the Great American Twitter Novel, tweeting and retweeting and subtweeting it one day at a time.
