Jennifer Egan talks about 'Black Box'

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan has written some cutting edge fiction. Her recent experiment, to use Twitter to create a fictional world as part of a science fiction project for The New Yorker, resulted in 'Black Box', a spy story that was tweeted over 30 days before appearing in The New Yorker. Now it's out as a digital download. We asked Jennifer to tell us about the process of writing 'Black Box' and why she chose Twitter to do it.

 'Black Box' is written as a series of communiqués by a female spy who is using her prettiness to infiltrate a network of evil men who may be planning acts of terror against the US. The key fact of it, because that makes it sound a bit James Bond, is that she filters each communiqué into a lesson she has derived from each step of the action. That's the way this individual piece ended up being suited to a Twitter structure - small units that combine to form a long story. When I first wrote it, it was double the length.

Twitter was the starting point. I knew I wanted to write fiction on Twitter before I knew whether it would work. I'm not a big social networker. I don't find connection itself all that interesting. But Twitter, instead of Facebook or Friendster or Myspace or any of its predecessors seemed more interesting. The thought of this raw narrative arriving in people's personal handsets or phones was exciting to me. I thought I would give it a try. I got myself a Twitter handle and I immediately felt uncomfortable in the role of the tweeter. I felt phony. I didn't feel like talking about myself that much. I didn't feel like sharing my thoughts or preoccupations on a moment-by-moment or even a day-by-day basis. I tend to take all that stuff and turn it into fiction. I quickly found that I was an awkward uncomfortable tweeter and didn't want to do it. Then my handle got hacked and sent out a bunch of vitamin adverts to my beleaguered followers and the failure was complete.

What I started to realise as I struggled to find a voice was that I wasn't interested in tweeting as myself. I was interested in fiction on Twitter. That dovetailed into another serious interest of mine… serialisation. Actually, in any creative endeavour. The most common dramatic serialisation we see is the television series. I've been very interested in the structure of serialised TV. In fact, that informed the structure of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which has a lateral, meandering structure. Part of the impulse to do that was from the series The Sopranos.

With Twitter, I thought this was a good way to write fiction in a structure that wouldn't happen naturally in a self-contained unit of fiction. I started to get a sense of a voice, of a way of talking - like this narrator's way of processing in a pedagogical way, the things that happen on her spy mission. When I started writing, I could immediately feel that it was going to be about gender roles and gender stereotypes, because she uses the stereotypes many of us have about pretty girls to hide her real purpose and expertise.

When I write fiction, it only ever works when a spontaneous voice is emerging. I wrote this piece by hand, as I do all of my fiction. I got a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. When I sat down with a legal pad, in the long spindly lines, the lessons, the communiqués looked wrong to me. I wanted them to look square. As soon as I sat down with my notebook, I felt excited. It felt like something was going to open in front of me instead of close. I wrote it as one very long draft, writing 5-7 pages a day. It was a novella at that length. It was a chaotic mess, especially the beginning. There was no way to understand what was going on for a long time. Calibrating the voice was also difficult. One of the challenges of Twitter, in an aphoristic style, is to not fall into the trap of stating the obvious. So one of the big edits I did was to cut everything that was true generally and not specific to this story. That removed 25% of it. It was an enormously exhausting editing process.

I'm so curious to see what other people do with Twitter now.

We have five analogue copies of 'Black Box' to give away. All you have to do is email us before 17 November and tell us the name of Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. UK only, I'm afraid.