Ian McMillan
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Perspectives on the Value of Art and Culture
The Unfollowed #ACEnovel
@IMcMillan
@NewWritingNorth
An original Twitter novel celebrating cultural value and 100,000 followers for @ace_national. Written by Ian McMillan and commissioned by New Writing North.
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Writing ‘The Unfollowed’ Ian McMillan
People who follow me on Twitter will know that I love the medium and so I jumped at the chance to write a Twitter novel. I wanted to make The Unfollowed a multi-layered piece; it’s a kind of horror/timeslip/alternative reality story, it’s about Twitter and how we use it, it’s about the shapes of clauses and sentences that Twitter forces us to create and it’s about the beauty of the character restrictions, how they force us to leave out pieces of punctuation or sometimes add syllables to make the tweet fit the format exactly. I wanted the novel to have a rhythm so that it could be performed and, as the author, I wanted to keep coming in because Twitter can be the most solipsistic and inward-looking medium. I wanted to play about with the idea of post-modernity, because I feel that Twitter, as a language-aggregator, is custom built for PoMo! This is the Twitter novel in its infancy; I feel a bit like the first cave person did when they made the first mark on a wall. I feel excited that this informal, throwaway form of discourse can be used to create something that hopefully has artistic merit and that people reading the novel will want to make Twitter novels of their own, moving Twitter into a new space that, yes, has Cultural Value. I had a ball writing the novel and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it!
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@IMcMillan/01
To set the scene: the empty house, the winter night. The taxi screeching to a noisy halt. The passenger as pale as milk. The smile. 02 The weather: cold. The sky: ink-black. The stars: hiding in a different room. The passenger (as pale as milk) pays. The taxi revs. 03
The taxi speeds off, disappears. The passenger’s hat is pulled so low across her face she seems to have no face at all. She walks. 04 The door creaks open in the empty house. The passenger enters, looks around. She is to meet somebody here. Who is it? No real idea 05
A shape in the room’s far shadow. If there is music here it should be doom-based. The figure walks towards the passenger. A scream The figure’s face is the passenger’s. They are one and the same. It is like looking in the mirror, twice. Music fades
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For this the passenger came here? To meet herself and stare and stare? A man speaks up: ‘Do you not remember me?’ His cold voice 08 The passenger (her name is Kate) now recalls how, as a child, she saw her grandad walk away. In uniform he walked to war. He waved
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And Kate thought he was dead but now he stands before her. Not a ghost but solid as a bag of chips. But who is her sad lookalike? 10 The grandad holds a photograph. Kate looks at it: it is her, but older somehow. Black and white. Her grandma’s face staring back. 11 Kate reaches for her phone to tweet. It’s her instinct: live, then tweet about the life. Mood music, all across the day, defining it 12
Her grandad stops her. ‘Tweet no more!’ he cries, his voice like car brakes screeching bends. She halts mid-tweet. His haunted eyes. 13
‘Tweeting rips the flimsy veil between the living and the dead’ he moans, his eyes like torches with batteries that fade too soon. 14
Kate laughs and then the laughter goes. ‘Tweeting brings the long dead back, and the short dead’ grandad says. Kate gasps, weeps. 15 Then suddenly the room is filled (as thunder booms as lightning flicks) with zombies who should not be here, their faces blank.
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It’s like a midnight bus from Hell, with passengers who haven’t paid; all the folks you’ve lied to, cheated and betrayed. Howling. 17 Except they’re just the ones who featured in Kate’s oh-sopoetic tweets. Bloke on train with a face like an armchair? Died, miss! 18
Woman who slipped on an escalator and her red pants illuminated the morning air and how we laughed? Dead and gone Kate, I’m afraid. 19 Cleopatra lookalike? Slipped this mortal coil. Man who wept in the pet shop? His funeral was last week. Kate frowns. A tear slides 20
Kate says: ‘So tweeting kills some people, and brings others back?’ And doppleganger Kate says Yes and her grandad nods. 21 Kate thinks of tweeting this, but stops. She thought it was just a game, something to fill the tweeting day, not rip Time’s cloth. 22
Grandad and the other Kate now stand so close to Kate she feels the breath across her face. ‘There is one thing you can do’ they say. 23 The silence in the room is huge, heavy. The dead and undead lounge around. Kate just asks ‘What can I do to detoxify this brand?’
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Grandad says: there is a place you can go, to undo the tweet wrongs you have done, to push these genies back in the bottle for ever 25 Kate says ‘I’ll do it! What can I do?And then maybe I can tweet about it all afterwards?’That makes the dead chortle and chuckle. 26
Grandad’s voice is lower now if that is possible.He points towards the window whose panes look like a hashtag made of ice and says 27 The Land Of Unfollow. That’s where you must go! Unfollow us all then we will be saved! Over Character Mountain, 140 steps, then go 28
Through the Slough of Respond, avoiding Delete, then through The Forest of Likes to the end, where…(here grandad gulps) IT waits. 29 If this was a postmodern Twitter novel, which it isn’t, I’d have Kate tweeting aspects of the plot for people to alter and refine. 30
Instead she waits, like the rest of us, to hear what she will find at the end of the forest. The other Kate gasps: The Unfollower!
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31 Now the music rises, swells, is full of strings; a double-bass is bowed just like those trees Kate passes in the Land of Unfollow. 32
That’s the first Kate; these Twitter novels are more complex than they first seem, I have to say. I’m wasting time. She is scared. 33 Ahead, crouching like a toad, The Unfollower breathes his stinking breath. Kate stands before him, her face a sad wide-eyed emoji. 34
An epic battle starts right here. Epics can’t be squeezed in tweets; they spill out from round the edge and dribble across the scr 35 Over the floor the protagonists tumble like two tyres rolling down a hill. The sound is: gasp. The sound is: grunt. Kate falls down 36
Then she gets up and grabs the Unfollower, clicks and clicks: unfollow, unfollow until he wrestles her down onto the ground, laughing. 37 This fight goes on for longer than a suite of tweets, longer than a tweet-portmanteau, longer than a tweety cruise across the sea!
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If Kate can force the Unfollower to unfollow himself then everything will fall into place; the Undead will die, the dead will live 39 All will then be as it was. If I can elbow my way in here as The Author, isn’t that just what we want? The fight carries on and on 40
Until, triumphant, Kate finally does the thing that she’s been trying to do: The Unfollower clicks Unfollow on himself, fades away 41 Like water gurgling down a drain. Let the music be triumphant. Brass, if you like: let’s have some brass. Kate dances back to 42
The empty house, the winter night. All is now just as it was. The taxi waits. The engine hums. Except… there is nobody there. 43 Unfollowing has lost them all. If you are followed, you exist. In this modern, gleaming world, existence is no longer based on trust 44
It’s who you follow, who follows you. Grandad’s gone; the other Kate deceased and former; frankly, late. Our Heroine stands, weeps
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45 And decides to write a Twitter novel about the things she’s just been through; twitter can be a force for good, she thinks. Tweet 46
Will build on tweet until the story’s done. Where to begin? How to squeeze actions and plot into this small space? Can it be done? 47 The twitter novel starts: ‘Call me Kate. And this is my twitter novel.’ So far so good. ‘To set the scene: the empty house.’ 48
As she writes, a shadow falls. The Unfollower. He has returned, back from the void. She does not see him, types away, fills a page And then he Unfollows her. And then she is there no more. Something’s dragged her through the door to emptiness. Unfollowing: it gets us all
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The empty house. The sock-black night. The stars like characters screen-lit. The loud taxi does not stop. This is the final tweet.