Pulitzer Prize-Winner Writes Short Story for Twitter: Brilliant or Bad Idea?

Remember how back in the day magazines used to release stories in installments? Well, with the help of today’s technology, serial fiction may be making a comeback.

In 2011, Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Now, she is making headlines again for her short story “Black Box”—a spy thriller that is being tweeted through The New Yorker Fiction Department’s Twitter handle @NyerFiction.

Egan’s 8,500-word story is being released over 10 days, beginning last Thursday. Each night, a portion of the story is being tweeted minute-by-minute from 8 pm to 9 pm. On Monday, the story will appear in print, in its entirety, in the Science Fiction Issue of the New Yorker.

When Egan was asked about her inspiration for the unusual format, she told the New Yorker, “I’d . . . been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization 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 forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea.”

Though the story will first be published on Twitter, Egan originally wrote the story by hand. And unlike the majority of tweets, which are composed in seconds, Egan spent a year working on these 140-character chunks.

So what do you think SodaHeads? Was Egan’s decision to write a short story for Twitter brilliant or a bad idea?