I was in the Time magazine archives recently, doing research for my biography of J. D. Salinger, when I pulled open a drawer and found a small box containing a bunch of discarded typewriter heads for the I.B.M. Selectric typewriter?the cutting-edge writing technology of my youth. I had written, or tried to write, my first stories while sitting before this ominously humming machine. At its center was a typeball?like a golf ball with letters?that leapt up to punch each letter onto the page with astonishing violence. Hitting a key was like firing a shot. A sentence was a strafing machine gun.
It seemed, at the time, like a radical innovation, but now I think of it as part of a unified group that includes everything from the quill to the word processor and the early forms of the P.C. All these technologies, however different they made the experience of composition, produced writing that was, at first, for the eyes of the writer alone.
I picked up the box, handled the metal orbs, the many tiny letters. Even in their diminished state, the little alphabet-planets retained some of their punishing, mechanical glamour. I put them back in their box and took a picture, which I then tweeted, along with a hashtag that seemed to speak for the charms of antique technology: #IBM.
Though Twitter is not exactly a new writing technology, it is a technology that is affecting a lot of writers. It used to be a radical cri de coeur to claim, ?We live in public.? Like many mantras of the cyber-nineties, this turns out to be mostly true, but misses an even larger truth: more and more, we think in public. For writers, this is an especially strange development.
I sometimes wonder how the great writers of the past would handle the Twitter predicament. Would they ignore it or engage and go down the rabbit hole? Who are the really unlikely tweeters from literary history? Would Henry James, whose baroque sentences could never have been slimmed down into a hundred and forty characters, have disdained Twitter?
Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line. But some writers achieve their effect through an accumulation, or make sense via sentences that are, by themselves, on the far edge of making sense. (Robert Musil comes to mind.) Not everyone is primed to be a modern-day Heraclitus, like Alain de Botton, who starts each day, it seems, by cranking up his inner fortune-cookie machine and producing a string of tweets that are, to varying degrees, sour, funny, fatalistic, and bitingly true. It?s a comedian?s form. The primal tweet may be, ?Take my wife, please!?
Gertrude Stein, with her gnomish, arty, aphoristic tendencies, would seem to be ideal. ?There is no there there? may be one of the great proto-tweets.
Joyce Carol Oates, whom I don?t think of as famously concise but who has become a prolific and often ingenious tweeter, recently tweeted a question: ?If an action is not recorded on a smart phone, does it, did it, exist??
Oates?s question touches on a set of major problems for writers on Twitter: Does a piece of writing that is never seen by anyone other than its author even exist? Does a thought need to be shared to exist? What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. It?s like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?
I nominate J. D. Salinger as the least likely tweeter in literary history. A tweet is, by definition, a violation of one?s privacy?in the sense of making public thoughts that would otherwise be private?and Salinger was, for much of his life, fiercely private and seemed to want only the kind of applause that is made by one hand clapping. This wasn?t due to bashfulness?when he was young he went out to parties and to the dance clubs of his day. But for him the creative act of writing was deeply entwined with the nourishing condition of privacy, even secrecy. This privacy, in turn, not only surrounded his work but was embedded in it. His writing seems to be to be spoken in confidence directly to the reader, singular. That is why so many Salinger fans feel that their relationship with his books, especially to ?Catcher in the Rye,? is like an intimacy shared.
Salinger?s defense of his privacy eventually came to seem as absurd as the attacks on it, but at the root of this defense wasn?t some terrible secret he had to hide but rather an idea of writing as a private ceremony.
Writing on Twitter brings the energy of a d?but to every phrase. You could say it imbues writing with a sense of performance, though writing has always involved performance in the sense of performance anxiety. The question for the writer who is leaving multiple pages crumpled on the floor?literally or figuratively?is for whom is that line, or paragraph, unsatisfactory? Who is the appraiser of one?s own unpublished, or even unwritten, work?
The editor Ted Solotaroff wrote an essay called ?A Few Good Voices In My Head,? in which he talked about managing this feeling of having an audience. His prescription is summed up in his title: a couple of trusted voices with whom a writer will engage in a dialogue?sometimes literally, more often not. Twitter is messing with this equation: I have many more voices in my head than I ever had before.
Managing the anxiety of composition is an essential part of writing. One must master the process of shepherding the private into public. There are bound to be false starts, excursions that turn out to be dead ends. But these ephemera?notes, journals, drafts?are all composed in a kind of psychic antechamber whose main feature is a sense of aloneness. They are the literary equivalent of muttering to yourself in a state of melancholy, or of dancing in front of the mirror with music blasting when you are alone in your room. Both of these are best done when no one is home.
Part of me thinks that having these scraps, these false starts, these isolated phrases, find their way into the public domain at the time they were written would have diminished the impetus of, say, Sylvia Plath or John Cheever, to do the work that has made so much of their ephemera fascinating in the first place.
Almost everybody who is a writer these days gets, at some point, a lecture on the necessity of being ?on? Twitter and Facebook. It?s a tool of selling and career building. It is, for writers of all ages and stages, not so much required reading as required writing. The whole thing seems stupid at first: you ignore whoever is giving you this lecture, until one day you decide, O.K., let?s try it out, and then discover that it?s kind of fun. And, as long as it?s done in moderation, it is kind of interesting. But could Twitter possibly be productive, beyond the basic act of publicizing what you have written and/or proving that you still exist?
I hadn?t thought so, until I composed a short piece, something between a journal entry and a personal essay, in a series of tweets. I wanted to recount an experience but wasn?t sure what I thought of it, and suddenly the idea of writing in public seemed like it would force me toward a further understanding. I wrote it out at night, when I do most of my writing. Something about tweeting at that hour reminded me how it once felt to talk into my friend?s C.B. radio ?that strange precursor to the Internet and its ?communities??way back when. Except, in this case, I wasn?t pretending to be a trucker. I was pretending to be me.
I found the experience to be strange, exhilarating, outrageously narcissistic, frightening, and embarrassing. In other words, like writing. But also like acting, or playing a concert?something whose essence is bound up in the fact that it?s being done live. You can?t really see the auditorium and don?t know the size of the audience. It?s like throwing paper airplanes out a high window: someone may see their elegant dive, maybe a lot of people. The plane will be rushed onward and out of sight. Except there is now a record of it. I assumed my series of tweets was a draft. They were not pages crumpled on the floor, exactly?more like pages to be stacked up and put aside, where, like some gourmet dish, its elements might have time to blend.
A day or two later I assembled the tweets, revised them into a short essay, and sent them out for publication. I didn?t say how the first draft had been written. This is how I thought of those tweets, as a first draft, one which would lead to another draft and maybe another and another, until I thought it was ready to be published, which it was.
A year or so later I composed another piece in the same manner. The first one took up about fifteen tweets. This new piece was longer. It was like being a juggler or a three-card-monte dealer: I drew a little crowd. The few assembled people clapped, via their tweets, and I bowed and hurried off with my fifty-three-tweet piece. I reworked it the next day, and sent it out?to this very blog?where I was told that they liked it but couldn?t use it. It had already been published. Salon took it.
?Don?t talk it out? was one of the best pieces of advice I ever got as a writer. On the other hand, I like to dignify hanging out and kibitzing with other writers as not just procrastination or a simple pleasure, but part of a process. Is tweeting talking it out before you write it, or part of a process? And what if writing a piece in tweets is considered publication? And if its appearance on Twitter equals being published, do I even have the rights to it anymore?
I had always thought of Twitter as being a good place to work out ideas: a place to mull things over in public, and a way of documenting a thought to make it more likely that I would remember it. But is it like a conversation or is it ?talking it out?? Is it a note to oneself that everyone can see, or is it, like iPhone photos, an attempt to offload the responsibilities of memory onto an apparatus that feels like an extension of ourselves because it is always in our hands? I sometimes wonder if I might ever be accused of stealing my own idea.
This is one of the central paradoxes of our culture?everything is swallowed into oblivion but nothing goes away. On the screen, it?s no longer clear who is in charge of the words, or at what point they cross the line between being a fluid, rearrangeable thing in your mind and being a verifiable statement made in public, on the record, for which you may one day have to answer. Many people are worried, understandably, that everything we do?online and off?is retrievable by the government. But what about everything we think? How much space do we afford ourselves for private thought?
Some people need to know what they are thinking in order to write it down or say it, and some people need to write or speak in order to know what they are thinking. I am one of those people for whom the act of formulating sentences, and reading them, is intrinsic to thought itself.
Technological innovations regarding writing?the typewriter, the electric typewriter, the computer and all its word-processing tools?have been about removing impediments to publishing one?s words. But they all have, until now, stopped short of the actual act of publishing. The line between writing and talking has also been blurred, and we can imagine that the line between talking and thinking will be, too, at some point. From my mind to yours when I blink my eyes.
My thoughts return to Salinger and his sense of writing as a mysterious ceremony whose secrets must not be disclosed. This philosophy would eventually mutate into the idea that writing is a mysterious ceremony made vulgar by the act of publishing. When I think about Salinger in his later years?literally half of his life?I feel exasperated by this withholding and the elevation of silence into the highest virtue. And I also feel that there really is a wisdom in this attitude. We live in a transparent age, and yet there is much of value that happens in the opaque quarters of our own ambivalent minds, seen by no one else, and seen by us only after a long period of concentration and looking.
Thomas Beller?s most recent books are the collection of essays ?How To Be a Man? and the novel ?The Sleep-Over Artist.? He is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University and a frequent contributor to Culture Desk. He is at work on a biography of J.D. Salinger
Illustration by Roman Muradov.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/the-ongoing-story-twitter-and-writing.html
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