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 until Friday with other dread chores. I printed a return label for the unflattering jeans I’d carelessly ordered in October and had left draped over a dead standing lamp since. I paid estimated quarterly tax on ~$12,000. 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 is a political thriller, set in the present, about a young woman in New York City whose pseudonymous Twitter account gets her into serious trouble. Let’s call this young woman Alice.

One summer night, while Alice is sleeping, the city sees a spectacular act of political violence. In two of its particulars the act uncannily resembles a viral meme that first appeared on Alice’s account. The next morning, Alice sees the headlines and knows her life is about to change for the worst. One indication of her trouble is an obscure 17-member Reddit board that had long been obsessed with her account, alternating vicious insults and extravagant praise. Suddenly r/TFisAlice is one of the most trafficked boards on Reddit Another indication is that neither of the two close friends who know her to be behind the account have reached out to her, and both are now ignore her requests to “grab a coffee.” Alice is sliding and twitching around her apartment, frantically overpacking a camping knapsack for her escape from New York, when her doorbell rings.

What I’ve just summarized was the novel’s second chapter. For that second chapter to work, I felt, the reader needed to arrive there already vibing with Alice. Ideally the reader would be sympathetic to her romantic and professional struggles, and curious about the role her pseudonymous account plays in her life.

In my mind, I’d bound the reader to my heroine successfully in the novel’s first chapter, the writing of which had come easily. My head was swollen with unearned confidence in my completed first chapter. I trusted any reader would reach the moment her doorbell rings in profound suspense, eager to know how this indisputably sympathetic heroine would negotiate this threat to her indisputably fascinating life.

Normally, I’m an obsessive reviser, tweaking each sentence nine times, with five of them reversions to a previous tweak. I was so confident in the first draft of my first chapter I made an exception, emailing it to my most talented literary friend. I told myself I needed to get it off my hands before I started squeezing prose blackheads visible only to me, and left a bloody mess.

That my friend didn’t respond the same day wasn’t the best sign. I had warned him I might do something rash like this and he assured me it was very good sign that I had overcome my crippling perfectionism. He shared my confidence, he said, and ordered me to send it immediately.

Maybe he’d gotten busy? (Even after assuring me he’d have time that weekend: “Just filed a piece.”) Maybe the chapter was so good he needed a day or two to organize his praise.

When we met the following day 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 allowed me to write that first chapter with such confident ease, to write about a woman with a secret online life, was that I had never had a secret online life. I had no idea what it encompassed, no finely textured sense of what made it interesting, and thus had no awareness of what I was failing to capture in my tiresome stereotype.

And why would I know anything about my heroine? The Twitter and Instagram accounts under my birth name were studiously bland: retweets, congrats, veg tacos, “city is a carnival” pics, pics of a neighbor’s dog. To cover rent I tutored teenagers from wealthy families, in the employ of their helicopter parents. The boys especially gave indications of deep dives into my online history. Posting anything naughty or controversial, or even irony that could be misconstrued, could get me sacked. And I couldn’t see the upside to letting families who owned Manhattan townhouses know of my daughterly attachment to Bernie Sanders.

Write what you know is famously bad advice. 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 some good advice. Become the person you want to write about 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