The Right ClickSteven Soderbergh tweets a suspense novella, 140 characters at a time
Film director Steven Soderbergh, who is probably better known for his work on Magic Mike and Ocean’s Eleven than his literary career, is releasing a novella in a very unconventional way.
Starting April 28, Soderbergh began posting pieces of Glue, a crime-suspense-thriller, in single tweets to his Twitter account, @Bitchuation.
Here’s a sample of the first few tweets:
CHAPTER ONE.
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
Amsterdam. twitter.com/Bitchuation/st… — Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
It was difficult for you not to assume the worst after the way your funeral went down. The whole thing seemed like a parody of itself.
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
Like anything else, the #&%# was only valuable because everyone wanted it and nobody had it. — Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
You’ve become the receptacle for everything forgotten, and an impulse can only be ignored for so long before people begin to wonder.
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
Everything that used to be a foregone conclusion was for sale—cheap—and regret was a dead battery. twitter.com/Bitchuation/st… — Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 28, 2013
The story, written in a second-person perspective, is still unfolding bit by bit through short tweets and the occasional photo.
While the Bitchuation account is unverified, Soderbergh confirmed it as his in an interview with Collider in February. In that interview, he also hinted that he had a longer project for Twitter-as-a-medium in mind even then. When told be the interviewer that he didn’t tweet enough, Soderbergh replied:
Here’s the thing, I have rules about that, which is I’m not there to sell anything. What will happen, it’s going to be streaky, what will happen is I build up a bunch of stuff and blow it out all at the same time. I don’t know if that’s the way you’re supposed to do it, but that’s the way it’s happening. I’m about a week away from another burst of tweets. It’s fun to have, it’s kind of like having a pseudonym, it’s kind of like being Peter Andrews, I feel I can hide behind that, which is fun.
While Soderbergh’s use of Twitter is certainly innovative, he’s not the first to share fiction in this way on the social network. The Verge wrote this piece on Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan when she shared her short story “Black Box” on the New Yorker fiction Twitter account @NYerFiction, ahead of the story’s publication in The New Yorker in May of last year.
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