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A twitter novel, part one of a thousand.


A lot of famous writers published their novels first in serial form in the newspaper of the day. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers one chapter at a time.
I was reminded of  this the other day after a morning of debauchery, feeling slightly ill, bingeing on one episode after another of Call the Midwife and compulsively scrolling through a random smattering of tweets on Twitter.

When I re-read The Stranger by Albert Camus last year I read it with newly twitter-conditioned eyes. I was keenly aware that his main character Meursault, who was hatched fully grown into a world that was questioning all the conventions that had governed life before. Perhaps there is no narrative, or morality post-modernism posited, perhaps life is just a series of random decisions and choices that make up our reality.  For this reason, this story of a post-modern poster man, who ends up killing a man because he gets irritated by hot sun,(just another decision in a long line of others), could have easily been converted into a long string of tweets.


I drink a coffee.
The sun is hot.
I killed a man.
I like Coldplay's old stuff.
The stars are so bright from my jail cell.

I decided to try and use Twitter to help me write in a straight line.  Producing one heavily edited sentence each day might lead me somewhere. Or not.
I am going to write the first 365 sentences and then re-evaluate.
If nothing else, it will force me to choose my words very carefully.

Follow along if you like, @PenNameDuJour
I can't promise it will be quick. Or straightforward.

Here's the first one to whet your whistle.

She clenched the key so hard , it created a ridge along her palm, the same palm she had just had read less than an hour before.
— A Novel Approach (@PenNameDuJour) May 15, 2014




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  1. Kate Hall5/16/2014 6:51 am

    ooh, its a good one. i can't follow twitter, but i hope to get glimpses here... rah! for the attempt, and the commitment. !

    ReplyDelete

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