Working On My Novel: process as performance

Working On My Novel is a book by Cory Arcangel that consists entirely of crowdsourced tweets containing the phrase “working on my novel.”

It’s easy to poke fun at the people whose tweets are used. They say things like “it feels good, you guys. I love my mind” and “yeah I’m a writer deal with it.”

There’s the humblebragging. There’s the contradiction of saying you’re working on your novel when you are in fact tweeting. There’s the elevation of Novel as Significant Literary Achievement.

What’s interesting is that Arcangel’s project, which started as a Twitter account, only gained serious attention once it was novelized; it’s since been covered by Vogue, The Guardian, Spiegel, etc. In this way, the success of Working On My Novel propagates the myth of the Novel at the same time it undermines it.

I don’t see this as a contradiction. Both the original tweets and Arcangel’s novelization of them illustrate the new way we do creative work. Specifically: we compose publicly and in realtime. We publish our process. And at some point, maybe, we pluck our finished work out of the Internet and make a physical object to cherish it by.

A completed composition is no longer a prerequisite for its performance.