THE ALICE ORIGIN STORY

I launched a pseudonymous Twitter account. What happened next may intrigue you.

Credit: some guy who got lucky

@AliceFromQueens, the burner account that ate my life, was born January 11, 2019. Setting up a burner had been on that week’s to-do list, and as usual I’d pushed it off to Friday with other dread chores. At my desk, I paid estimated quarterly tax on ~$12,000. I printed a return label for the unflattering jeans I’d ordered in October, and had left draped over a dead standing lamp since. Finally I opened the Twitter sign-up page.

The short of it is that I’d hit a wall with a novel I’d started writing. It was a political thriller, set in the present, about a young woman in New York City with a pseudonymous Twitter account. Let’s call this girl, who is single and tutors rich kids for a living, Celia.

Celia’s pseud account is a simple pleasure for her, the purest lark. She posts photos of her meatless meals, and the books in her lap; she insults Elizabeth Warren, and effuses over Bernie Sanders. When she needs an ego boost, the books in the pic rest on her bare legs, sometimes her bare stomach, and her replies and DMs fill with offers of love and money from men around the world.

Meme work is Celia’s strong suit, however. Her Adam Sandler memes are funny but it’s her Sanders memes that make her pseud account a dim star in the Extended Bernie Twitteratic Universe. Big “dirtbag” accounts periodically share one of her sardonic or adorable graphics. For a day or two, in secret, she tastes Virality, with stresses and joys. She gains a few hundred new followers before her pseud returns to a more comfortable obscurity.

Late one summer night, with Celia asleep in her apartment, New York City is visited by a spectacular act of political violence. Wild “unconfirmed” reports electrify social media through the wee hours, and some turn out to be true. By the time Alicia wakes up, the website of every national news outlet features the “apparent NYC terror attack.”

The sidebar stories covering theories and tentative leads in the case do not yet mention the uncanny resemblance of the attack to a recently popular meme variant posted two weeks earlier, first to a pseudonymous Bernieland Twitter account. But it’s not hard to find the resemblance mentioned on Reddits and on Twitter—and now on a web-only news site known for pushing false rumors along with the occasional broken-clock scoop.

Celia is sliding and twitching around her apartment, overpacking a knapsack for her escape from New York, when her doorbell rings. The confusingly young East Asian man she sees through her peephole is showing a badge from the FBI.

What I’ve just summarized was my novel’s second chapter. For that second chapter to work, the reader needed to arrive there already vibing with Celia. Ideally, the reader would be sympathetic to her romantic and vocational struggles, delighted and a bit disturbed by her pseudonymous life online.

Specifically, the reader needed to begin Chapter Two fretful that the account would get Celia fired from tutoring rich kids. Her somewhat humiliating job nonetheless paid absurdly well for not many hours’ work. It also gave her entree into families in the top .01%, who fascinated and repelled her.

As far as I could tell, the first chapter I’d drafted succeeded in all these ways. I trusted the reader to reach the moment Celia’s doorbell rings in great suspense, dying to know how this fascinating and sympathetic heroine will handle a visit from the FBI.

I’m an obsessive reviser, tweaking each sentence nine times, with five reverting to previous tweaks. But here I was so confident in the first draft I sent it at once to my most talented literary friend. I needed to get it off my hands before I began squeezing prose blackheads visible only to me, and left a bloody mess.

Maybe my friend was busy? A few days went by with no answer. Or maybe the chapter was so good he needed time to organize his praise.

When we eventually met in his apartment, he said, “Where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s…not what was I hoping for?”

“I can’t say what I think before I know what happens.”

“You’re saying it’s lame, which is fine. I mean I had a feeling.”

“I’m saying I don’t know.”

Look. Whatever age you think I am, I’m old enough to know what that means. When a professional writer steeped in literature reads a strong piece of fiction, the event is so rare, they jump out of their skin like HOLY CRAP I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, not (double-checking phone), “Where’s the rest of it?”

I had Dunning-Krugered myself. What let me write so freely about a woman with a secret online life was that I’d never had one. I had no idea what such a life encompasses, no finely textured sense of what made it real, and thus no awareness of what my bland stereotype failed to capture.

Write what you know is famously bad advice for young writers. Unless you’ve been very lucky, or very unlucky, you only know your family, love life, school, and a few jobs. Odds are, you’re not the only writer familiar with those experiences

Become the person you want to write about, though: that’s good advice. That should be engraved on every MFA seminar-room wall. Obviously, I couldn’t join the FBI to better understand my heroine’s nemesis. But nothing stopped me from launching a pseudonymous Twitter account.

Weather reports for that January 11th confirm my memory of a clear cold day. The sun made a big multi-color stink of leaving the sky early, like a divorced dad spewing presents on his way out. A down puff warmed my legs up to the thousand-dollar silver lap-warmer Apple markets as an Air. I had no other plans that Friday except to “recover from my week,” and binge on stupid Mr Robot.

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CHAPTER 2: THE HOW