Keira Rathbone

Teju Cole was stuck in traffic in Mumbai when an idea came to him. He had recently written a short story and he thought, why not share it in tweets? Cole is the author of two books of fiction, Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. He's also a prolific voice on Twitter. So he began direct-messaging friends who were online, asking if they wanted to participate in a “storytelling experiment.” To those who said yes, he sent a sentence, instructing them to post it for their followers. He then retweeted them in order. The result was “Hafiz,” the story of a man sitting on a sidewalk and the impact he has on passersby. Seemingly cobbled together from 31 people in 31 retweets, it's one of the best examples of how literary fiction— a traditional medium with selective gatekeepers—can successfully engage with the way people read online. But Cole likes to push boundaries—practicing his craft on Twitter the way a pianist practices scales.

Why did you decide to tweet your story?

I had written “Hafiz”—printed, it would be a very short story—and edited it, and I found it curiously satisfying. This was at a time when I was taking a break from tweeting. I'd been gone a few months, and I wasn't sure if I'd return. But then I thought, “What about a gentle reentry into the fray?” One way to do that was to retweet. And I realized that, by giving tweets to friends via DM, I could create this strange little bit of magic. A narrative could just begin to appear in my timeline. When a line from the story was tweeted, I'd retweet it and only then figure out who to ask to do the next one.

Why do that instead of posting the story on your own feed?

Distributed storytelling was interesting to me; I didn't know if anyone had done it before. And I wanted the story to feel emergent, from a source that no one could have suspected. We generally haven't thought of retweets as being like that.

I'm also fascinated by this thing that happens on Twitter: A friend of yours in Singapore tweets something and then someone in San Francisco tweets something, and they're not tweeting at each other—actually, you're the only person who sees those two tweets together because that's your timeline. And yet they speak to each other in a funny kind of way.

Were people confused?

Yes, there was confusion, and then a sense of magic, a delight. When I said I'd written the whole thing myself instead of finding random tweets, one or two people wrote cranky responses. But most people liked it. I especially liked the way it created an imagined community of these 31 people who were connected only by this one story.

Do you find twitter addictive?

I'm addicted to it the way I'm addicted to coffee or to my headphones: guiltlessly.

How has twitter affected you creatively as a writer?

Twitter engages the part of me that makes sentences. I try to shape a sentence that works. And I know this because I sometimes put sentences out there that don't really work. With most other forms—if it's good enough, it's good enough. But I read poetry regularly. And poetry is where I see that every single line has a certain punch and precision to it. Being on Twitter has allowed me to participate in a similar kind of practice. When you're writing fiction and longform prose, you think about the best sentences, of course, and you work on them. But when you're tweeting, the sentences are isolated, they're naked, and so there is that much more scrutiny on how they work.

Do you write on your phone?

I write on my iPhone, on my computer, in little notebooks. I'm constantly jotting down notes. The one place I can't is in the shower. I think the technology will get there—but for now it's a good thing to have somewhere I'm awake but can't write.