In 2012, novelist Jennifer Egan published an 8,500-word sci-fi story in the form of a series of gnomic, seemingly self-contained tweets that unspooled over the course of ten nights. Any risk to the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s sterling literary reputation was minimal. The elemental dispatches of “Black Box” were tweeted from the account of the New Yorker magazine, and the story was already slated to appear in its pages the following month. She was using social media as a narrative playground of sorts, but also as a distribution platform.
Egan is clearly fascinated by the interplay between page and screen. A Visit From the Goon Squad incorporated text messages into its prose, and structured its most heartbreaking chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. Though she is not active on Twitter, Egan described her attachment to the medium’s specific modes of expressivity, citing “the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and … the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters.”
Indeed, the experience of encountering “Black Box” as a series of suspenseful nightly incursions into a stream of breaking news, clickbait, and water-cooler chat felt more exciting than reading it in the cordoned-off Fiction pages of the magazine. Written in second-person address, the story’s sentences feel more tense and immediate than the average tweet. If you didn’t follow the story, you might mistake individual tweets for random bits of helpful advice, such as: “A woman holding a thrashing baby in one arm may have trouble aiming a firearm with the other.” Despite her viral marketing savvy, Egan made clear that the experiment’s origins were entirely analog; she wrote the bulletins by hand in a notebook that had eight rectangles on each page.
“Black Box” remains brilliant, and it may have taken the social-media serial mainstream, but its particular innovations only hinted at the genre’s potential. Its narrative trajectory was carefully mapped out, unresponsive to reader feedback, and generally ignored the network’s expectation of social reciprocity. All the @replies and #amwriting hashtags in the world wouldn’t change a thing: The author was still in charge.
Egan’s ambivalence about embracing the wilder possibilities of the social-media serial makes sense — why volunteer to subject a painstaking creative process to real-time scrutiny? But increasingly, established authors are entering the fray, opening the lid on their works in progress. We’re seeing literary pros willing to moonlight as amateurs, adopting a casual, fragmentary approach to fiction and subordinating their method to the speed of social media. The newest wave of serialized fiction — or social fiction — offers a way for best-selling wordsmiths to test the durability of their prose against the ephemerality of the stream.
The serial format offers a way to both extend and tease the pleasures of not knowing what happens next.
Twitter didn’t invent the serial, of course; even Serial didn’t invent the serial. The mammoth tomes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot may look imposing on a bookshelf, but in the 19th century they were consumed in weekly or monthly installments. As the authors well knew, a story, on some level, is just one thing after another, and the serial format offers a way to both extend and tease the pleasures of not knowing what happens next. The serial is built upon a series of contradictions, suggesting both deferral and infinite plenitude, the perpetual promise of the new and the reappearance and recontextualization of the old. The greatest serials — which is to say, in the case of Bleak House and Middlemarch, the greatest novels, period — unfold at a leisurely pace while stoking a ravenous hunger for a speedy conclusion.
The dimming cultural centrality of the novel, the speed of social media, and the array of entertainments competing for our screen time has not dampened audiences’ hunger for long, detailed narratives consumed in pieces. For UC Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, it’s a way to manage the stress of a demanding economy: “The less time we have, the more time we spend watching in the parcelled-out mode of seriality.” It affects both our consumption and production of stories. The social network Wattpad, for example, boasts 20 million readers and two million writers of serialized fiction designed to be read on an iPhone. With inline commenting, users can interact with the story while reading. For fledgling storytellers, the barrier to entry is nonexistent. You don’t even need much time.
Mitchell described the 140-character limit as a “diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket.”
Even if you had written Cloud Atlas or The Handmaid’s Tale, you might be tempted by the appeal of a new, low-stakes literary form. (You also might be willing to ignore the financial ramifications of giving your work away for free.) David Mitchell’s latest novel Slade House originated as a tweeted short story, and Margaret Atwood — killing time with in-flight Wi-Fi — joined the #TwitterFictionFestival with a story inspired by previews of movies shown on a plane. Back in 2009, Neil Gaiman collaborated with his followers on a user-generated novel, Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry, which quickly became available as an audiobook.
None of these authors are pretending to replicate the pleasures and rigors of their critically acclaimed novels, and for the most part they recognize both the freedoms and limitations of writing for the small screen. Atwood suggested that “the novel in itself has always escaped confining definitions,” but Mitchell, eager to get back to the business of penning freewheeling humanist epics, described the 140-character limit as a “diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket.”
Others have used the straitjacket as a form of creative exercise. When the prolific and endlessly inventive movie director Steven Soderbergh announced his early retirement from feature filmmaking, he said that “the tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me,” and that “everything depends on whether I succeed in becoming an amateur again.” What this meant in practice was a turn to television, theater, painting, the importing of Bolivian liquor, and at least two Twitter feeds that experiment with serial narrative. He set himself a challenge to conjure narrative complexity from a platform that encourages the proliferation of noise.
In 2013, someone who is presumably Soderbergh took to the unverified Twitter account @Bitchuation and began to tweet a noirish “novella” called Glue. Like “Black Box,” it was written mostly in second-person direct address over the course of several nights, and built upon a series of cryptic and quotable individual dispatches. The elliptical Glue begs to be called cinematic, repeatedly printing a literal “BEAT” between lines of dialogue, as if giving instructions to an actor, and incorporating expressive, mysterious iPhone-camera photos that often either elaborate upon or undercut the action. After completing the project, Soderbergh deleted the tweets, and published Glue as an expensive, limited-edition printed book sold only through his Extension765 online marketplace. Though Glue represented a complete new work from a major American artist in the prime of his career, it was treated primarily as an object of curiosity, and not a novel worthy of an assessment in the New York Times Book Review. This hesitance is justifiable, because who knew which Glue was the real Glue, or whether the story would ever find its final, official shape?
Perhaps the most significant development of the new social fiction is its gesture towards the crowdsourcing of creation.
In a speech at the San Francisco Film Festival explaining his creative disenchantment, Soderbergh cited the work of Douglas Rushkoff, whose 2013 book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now worried that in a contemporary networked environment “previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result, instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. There’s so much information coming from everyone, from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time.”
The writing of fiction is a historically private, solitary act, and perhaps the most significant development of the new social fiction is its gesture towards the crowdsourcing of creation, with cause and effect made increasingly visible.
Taking the concept to its audacious, almost dystopian extreme, in October 2015 the prodigious Brooklyn author Joshua Cohen partnered with New York-based publisher of Internet oddities Useless Press to write a serialized novel in real time. For the PCKWCK project, named after Dickens’ sprawling serial The Pickwick Papers, Cohen subjected his creative process to the scrutiny of all interested parties. For five hours a day on five consecutive days, visitors to PCKWCK.com could watch a live feed of the author — sometimes shirtless, often dangling a cigarette from his mouth, at one point donning an “NSA” cap — as he composed an original novel in a Google Doc-style text box at the center of the screen.
It was like a literary version of (the gamer platform) Twitch, and similarly interactive. Participants were encouraged to leave comments in a raucous, unmoderated chat room that took up the right of the screen, and answer a daily questionnaire. After Cohen reviewed the chat logs and user feedback at night, our contributions would sometimes find their way into the next day’s text.
Cohen had little to lose, other than his sanity. He recently published, through more conventional means, one of the year’s most acclaimed novels, a 580-page tome about surveillance and search engine optimization called Book of Numbers, which begins, notoriously, with a truculent statement of purpose: “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off.”
On PCKWCK.com, watching Cohen attempt to feed the hungry maw of fiction fiends and hostile trolls, to navigate the blinking cursor, to go back and wrestle every “TKTKTK” or “FIXFIXFIX” into legible prose — it was excruciating. But when I reached Cohen by phone, a week after the serial experiment concluded and his text was taken offline, he was remarkably sanguine about the project’s next stage.
“The writing is only part of the book,” Cohen says. “Possibly the worst part of the book, and almost certainly the least important part.” When PCKWCK was published as a limited-edition book in November, on the anniversary of the first publication of the original Pickwick Papers, it served as a presentation of the data sets accumulated over the five-day writing period. “The data includes the answers to a set of survey questions, the metrics of how people clicked on words, preferred certain sentences that had more adjectives or less adjectives, or sentences in which pronouns were used only after the first clause.”
Even though Cohen’s mining of the reading preferences of the apparently 1.2 million people who viewed PCKWCKcould only take place online, he’s adamant that the book is the only way to represent the totality of his undertaking. “There really is no way to present that online,” he says. “It’d be a design nightmare. Pages can get a lot messier than websites can. So it was important to me to present it as a book. The book is the only place where the totality of the project lives. The spectacle is on the screen, but the book has the data, the structure behind the writing.” He sees the finished product as an attempt to build an artistic model of our use of search engines, in which our quest for information is also a way to lend our tastes and preferences to advertisers. Cohen will not profit off the experiment; the proceeds are going to the ACLU.
“The idea that one doesn’t invent one’s own restrictions, to me, is insane.”
Cohen does not use Twitter or Facebook, and I doubt he owns a smartphone. Though the author willingly subjected himself to the limitations of an online platform, he’s unenthusiastic about the prospects of 140-character fiction. “The idea that one doesn’t invent one’s own restrictions, to me, is insane,” he says. “I don’t just mean that in a technical way, but honestly, in an artistic or spiritual way. We all exist within restrictions that we are free to see as self-generated or imposed. And I feel like grappling with your own questions as to the origin of those limitations, personally, is more interesting than accepting those that are handed to you by fiat.”
Cohen’s novels, at least one of which is more than 1000 pages, are not designed for fragmentary consumption, and he doesn’t see it as his job to cater to the tastes of the easily distracted reader. “I wrote a book about attention,” he says, referring to Book of Numbers. “I sort of believe that it doesn’t exist, that it’s a word superstition — an artificial resource designed to create an artificial scarcity in order to monetize time and drive fear into the hearts of men. It’s been enormously effective.”
