It’s true, getting a sentence or a fragment every hour — that’s how I am now scheduling my tweets — is not like sitting down and reading an extended section of the book through. You won’t necessarily remember what went before. The text will work on the reader in a different way — but I am interested to see just how.

Roger won’t mind me saying that I don’t think this is a good idea from a storytelling perspective. It’s difficult to remember what happened in the previous tweet and the tweets are being published on Roger’s feed, not a dedicated one. Added to this, the sentences seem curiously ordinary, notwithstanding the assumption that Roger has truncated them to fit within the 140-character limit.

Have you ever been reading a novel when you come across a great sentence? If you read it aloud to the person sitting next to you, expecting them to be impressed, they’ll just shrug¹. That’s because all the context has been stripped away. I get this feeling with tweeted fiction. The advantage of Twitter lies in isolated, forgettable information. A story needs to be integrated and memorable.

We’ll see how it goes. Certainly Roger’s exercise has worked as a marketing device. But I can’t help wondering if this is a tweet too far.

► Adventures in Twit Lit

What is Twitter? The article’s author, John M. Grohol, provides a good summary:

The best way to imagine Twitter is as a 24/7 online conversation that never ends, even when you’re away from the computer. Since tweets are so short, they better take on more of an immersive, real-time feel of a talking conversation than, say, an email. Think instant messaging, except instead of talking to a single person, you’re talking to the world (and the world talks back!).

Grohol, a psychologist, goes on to talk about the pros and cons of Twitter. As for pros:

On the pros side, Twitter is yet another way to communicate online. I’m not certain anyone thought we needed this (”Oh great, one more thing I need to keep updated!”), but its popularity speaks to an unfilled communications void. The fact that it allows you to also update your status on other social networks means it can act as a central “status updating” service.

As for cons:

Twitter can […] bring about a feeling that you’re “missing something” when you’re not online and see your Twitter feed. Normal human conversations have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Twitter has none of these things — it’s continuous and nonstop, even when you’re gone. This can impart a sense of needing to “always be there” to see what’s going on. This isn’t necessarily a new feeling for some people, but the constant conversational updating on Twitter brings it to a new level.

While we’re being psychological, I’d like to add that this can be viewed from a behaviourist perspective. Psychological behaviourism is a way of looking at the world in terms of the relationship between the animal (that’s you) and the environment (that’s your computer). It seems to me that an important factor in the attractiveness of Twitter lies in the pseudo-random occurrence of things that we consider important. For us, this is something just plain interesting, like Stephen Fry sharing his views on a new gadget, or the fact that Roger N. Morris has shaved off his beard. Such things are not earth-quivveringly important (except to Roger’s dinner companions) but they do serve as reinforcers in the parlance of the behavioural psychologist.

What you have, then, is known as a variable interval schedule of reinforcement. In other words, you can never truly predict when the next interesting tweet is about to arrive. From decades of empirical research, we know that behaviour that is randomly reinforced is very difficult to extinguish. This underlies — some would go so far as say to ‘explain’ — problematic gambling behaviour. Think of a fruit machine: You’ve got to keep feeding the slot with money because maybe, just maybe, the sweet reinforcement of a jackpot is around the corner.

Twitter: It could be you.

► The Psychology of Twitter | World of Psychology

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

You’ll have noticed that I include my Twitter feed in the footer text of this website. So, when I’m drinking a coffee and feel that the world needs to know; or I’m stuck on a train outside Basingstoke; or I’m watching Dr Who…then I can tweet.

Twitter is one of those technologies that gives Web 2.0 a bad name. That is, whenever I explain it to people who don’t use social networking thingies, they look at me like I’m a complete idiot.

Just like you’re looking at your web browser right now, very probably.

For a long while, I’ve been interested in somehow capturing — live — the process of creating a novel. I’d like to put together a form of parallel art that mirrors the insertion, deletion and movement of words around the manuscript, and perhaps make a time-lapse film of it. I’m still a long way from being able to do this. Some species of screen capture technology pointed at my word processor might do the trick, but the bandwidth implication makes me dizzy.

So, as part of this experimentation with reflecting the ongoing development of a novel, I have created a Twitter account for my heroine, Saskia Brandt. The current novel (my third in this series; the first was published as Déjà Vu) is set in 1907. That’s where my time traveller has wound up.

Who is Saskia Brandt? (If you haven’t read Déjà Vu and think you might, look away now.) Saskia is physically fit, about 30 years old — nobody is quite sure of her age — and a former detective with the European Föderatives Investigationsbüro, a specialist organisation set up in 2019 to address EU-wide computer crime. She was forcibly put through an experimental procedure that left her with a small, glass-covered chip at the back of her brain. It contains a digital copy of a murdered woman’s mind. It contains what is, essentially, Saskia’s personality. The original personality of her physical brain is suppressed; though it can usurp control in her dreams and moments of stress. Various skills were flashed onto the chip before insertion, including weapons handling, language competency (she understands more than 6000 languages), and special programs that post-process sensory information. In 2023, she travelled backwards in time and is currently being hunted by her former employers. Now she’s in St Petersburg in 1907.

Saskia Brandt is going to tweet her ‘status’ as the current novel is being written. You’re very welcome to add Saskia to your Twitter friends, if you have an account. She’ll add you straight back. Her Twitter address is: http://twitter.com/saskiabrandt You don’t, by the way, need an account to follow her. Her status updates are now included in the page footer, and you can visit the above address manually.

Here are some rules:

• She will update her status about once a day; her time frame is ‘live’ in the sense that she will tweet about things happening to her in that day’s writing session
• Her statuses will contain teasers, not spoilers
• Though she is updating her status as though she had a mobile phone in 1907, the character in the final novel will not be stopping every few pages to send a tweet
• Saskia will reply to your questions if you ask them, but will not spoil the story

Interested? Then make Saskia a Twitter friend. I’m currently 4400 words into the manuscript (which will total around 100,000), so Saskia will be tweeting for the next few months. Here’s the latest tweet. For her, it’s November 1907 and she’s travelling into St Petersburg on behalf of a criminal organisation which (I think) she’s just betrayed.