Twitter Narratives

The Right Sort by David Mitchell 

Having already published his many intricate novels, in 2014 David Mitchell decided to use Twitter as the means for publishing his new short story The Right Sort. The short story was published as a series of more than two hundred and eighty tweets in the course of one week.

     Although Twitter made it possible for a vast audience to access the short story in the making, read it and follow the events, it sounded a bit difficult to follow the tweets published randomly by Mitchell in the morning or at night. In the end, the story was published as a reorganized set of tweets, which made it easier to follow and enjoy.

     Using Twitter as a means of creation might seem impossible, however, David Mitchell proved it wrong by this project and had a great reception by his readers.

Black Box by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, award winning novelist, took over the twitter account of the New Yorker and published Black Box, a novel published sentence by sentence on the social media platform.

     The story appears as a female spy’s handbook: the female intelligence officer, posing as a ‘beauty’, infiltrated the realm of the violent and most dangerous target. The handbook-style of the narration displays what happens to the agent, what her choices are, which choices she makes and ultimately what the consequences of her actions are. Furthermore, this form of interior monologue shows a coping mechanism of a woman who is caught between the role she has to play to fulfill her mission and the emotional self that is violated and endangered by an aggressor.

     Egan’s portray of this spy is thrilling and engaging. Similar to a John Le Carré novel, the reader fears for the protagonist to be exposed and at the same time hopes for more daring moves by the protagonist that lead to greater knowledge. Egan’s protagonist, however, is not fully entangled in her professional life. She has a life away from her job, the wish to come back to a husband after a successful mission, which opposes the notion of the ‘Black Box’. Upon losing her cover the agent’s basic aim is to ensure her body to reach her agency as a black box, a record of her actions and discoveries.

     The limitations of a twitter post create a sequence of short to medium length sentences which add up to 47 short chapters. The jumps from post to post, from sentence to sentence, play along with the flow of the actions. The reading speed increases through jumps but also through repeated beginnings of sentences. The text has a list like character in chapters such as chapter 43. The handbook that is mostly directed at the narrator herself, consists of short commands, observations and choices that match the length of a tweet. 

Z. Lessan & S. Plum