Proof, if proof were needed, that stories really aren't what they used to be. Yesterday evening, the New Yorker began what is, for them, a novel experiment: tweeting Jennifer Egan's latest story, Black Box, in hourly instalments over 10 days from 8pm to 9pm EST. Egan's certainly not the first author to dip a toe into the waters of Twitterfiction, but when an organ as stately as the New Yorker espouses what has heretofore been the province of the out there and the maverick, what previously looked liked dabbling starts to resemble a plunge.
In truth, I'm not yet convinced that Twitter has been positively integrated into the fiction-writer's armoury. When tweeters discuss what's great about their platform, they focus on its immediacy and its interconnectedness; its responsiveness to the wider world, and the quick-fire back-and-forth it fosters between its users. Long-form fiction, served up by Twitter, is neither immediate (in the case of Egan's story it's being fed out over a 10-day period, with 23-hour gaps) nor part of a conversation. I can see how Twitter is a perfect fit for genuine flash fiction, where the form (140-character bursts) meshes wholly with the function (epigrammatism), but the problem with a longer story is that the medium isn't integral to the work itself, and ends up as nothing more than a quirky/clunky method of delivery. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to read Egan's story in its entirety, when it appears? There's some hopeful speculation over at Wired magazine that the New Yorker's wheeze might herald the return of serialised fiction, but frankly I don't buy that either: the magazine's planning to publish Black Box in full as part of its SF edition on Monday (at around the halfway-point of the Twitter serialisation), which kind of blows that argument out of the water. So I'm left unsure as to what, precisely, the Twitter drip-feed is going to add to the experience.
Having said all that, I imagine if anyone can convince me, it's probably Egan; she is, after all, no stranger to the fun you can have with format. Her Pulitzer prizewinning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad shuffled together 13 semi-discrete chapters ranging in dimension from a celebrity interview to a Powerpoint presentation: sounded gimmicky as all hell in the press release; worked beautifully in the flesh. And this latest experiment is clearly something she's serious about – she's taken "a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material". Explaining her rationale on the New Yorker blog, she says:
"I'd been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialisation on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it's a rich one – because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and 40 characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea... "
Unfortunately, in order to see if Egan can make something new and compelling out of this mix, I'd have to stay up until 1am GMT every night for the next week or so, which I should say here and now isn't going to happen: that dedicated I am not. So US readers/nightowls, I'm relying on you to tell me: does it work? And everyone else: what do you think of the notion? Is there anything in it, or are we guilty of trying to fit a quart into a pint pot?
