Email
Apparently inspired by a sudden infatuation with the storytelling possibilities of Twitter, David Mitchell’s The Right Sort is arguably the first work by a major novelist delivered entirely in tweets. Mitchell has described the process of writing an entire short story via 280 separate 140-character chunks as a “diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket”.
A strange bright blurring hovers there, pulsing like a jellyfish. Jonah and Norah lean in close, eyes longing, eyes wolfish...
— David Mitchell (@david_mitchell) July 20, 2014
Of course, Mitchell isn’t the first writer to embrace the challenges and opportunities that Twitter offers. Neil Gaiman, the much-loved author of Coraline, American Gods and and the comic book series The Sandman, took user-generated content to its logical conclusion with Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry, an his attempt to write a novel in collaboration with his followers. Gaiman offered an opening line:
Gaiman then invited contributions from his followers on Twitter. The final result is available as an audiobook, credited to “Neil Gaiman & Twitterverse”.
Of course, for some, 140 characters is all you need. Granta-listed author Dan Rhodes is an exponent of the art of the ultra-short story, with his debut book Anthropology, consisting of 101 stories, each 101 words in length. His recent follow-up, Marry Me containing 80-odd stories of marriage, none longer than a page and a half.
But perhaps the best Twitter novelist was unaware of the appropriateness of his art to social media – given he was writing more than 100 years ago.
The Parisian anarchist Félix Fénéon wrote a series of small ads for Le Matin newspaper over a short period in 1906. Each was a self-contained story, consisting of just three lines, filled with intrigue but with no further explanation. (A sample, 133-character tale: “Bones have been discovered in a villa on Ile Verte, near Grenoble, belonging – she admits it – to the clandestine offspring of Mme. P.”) Posthumously collected in the book Novels in Three Lines, Fénéon’s tales can be read as a very Situationist in-joke (the title can be translated both as “novels” and “novelties”). They were saved for posterity by his mistress, who cut out all 1,220 examples and saved them in a scrapbook. And yet Fénéon’s stories are perfect for Twitter – as proved by the account set up in his name, @novelsin3lines. It only took a century for him to find the right outlet. Perhaps that’s his best punchline of all.
No one hanged the young Russian Lise Joukovsky; she hanged herself, and the Rambouillet magistrates have allowed her to be buried.
— Félix Fénéon (@novelsin3lines) November 8, 2010
