Twitter presents special challenges to us all. Its 140 characters require a certain amount of thought and crafting, but what about when it comes to novelists, the ultimate in long form writing?

Some writers are entirely dismissive of Twitter. Will Self recently called it “a waste of time and talent” while Jonathan Franzen has said “Twitter is unspeakably irritating…the ultimate irresponsible medium”. He has no time for Facebook either although the New Yorker did use Facebook to give fans exclusive access to one of Franzen’s stories.

The disdain held by some hasn’t stopped others and pullitzer prize-winning author Jennifer Egan has released an 8,500 short story on Twitter, called ‘Black Box’, in a serialisation experiment with the New Yorker’s fiction Twitter account @NYerFiction.

Reading Egan’s New Yorker tweets some of them read like haikus or poetry, and while I worried that it might feel far to bitty to follow, but you get quickly drawn in and I think it is a great success.

Part of that, of course, is down to Egan’s skill as a writer and the way that tweets have been structured. It just reads so well, the staccato flow reminiscent of Joan Didion, writer of ‘Blue Nights’ and ‘The year of magical thinking’.

In the New Yorker Egan explained her rationale for a by tweets story:

“Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself….I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can ha ppen in a hundred and forty characters.”

At such moments, it may be useful to explicitly recall your training:

— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) May 25, 2012

“You will be infiltrating the lives of criminals.

— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) May 25, 2012

“You will be in constant danger.

— New Yorker Fiction (@NYerFiction) May 25, 2012

Twitter’s own manager of editorial programming, Andrew Fitzgerald (@magicandrew), has been working with writers to help them get more out of Twitter and is particularly excited about Egan:

“Something I’ve long admired is the flexibility the Twitter platform provides. It can be used for all kinds of storytelling, which is one of the things that makes working with authors on Twitter so fun. For fiction writers, Twitter is a big blank canvas with millions of readers available in an instant. I always get excited when an author begins to really play with Twitter and format. Teju Cole’s ‘Small Fates’ are a great example of this: self-contained 140 character stories of life — and often, how it ends.

“So I’m especially excited about Jennifer Egan’s new short story “Black Box”, which the New Yorker fiction department is serializing on Twitter. Yes, Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and that’s pretty awesome. Yes, it’s the New Yorker’s fiction department, and that’s awesome too. But there’s more: this story is so good!”

Egan is not the first to come this way although perhaps the most high profile. She won her pullitzer prize for 2011′s ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’.

Others have tried it as well including Robert Blechman who posted his novel via Twitter 140 characters at a time over 15 months between 2009 and 2010.

About the same time Matt Stewart began tweeting his debut novel ‘The French Revolution’.

There are obvious comparisons with Charles Dickens here and an earlier kind of serialisation although as one commenter on the New Yorker put it “Dickens would hardly get a full sentence in one tweet. Jen is remarkable and the only reason I signed onto Twitter”.

Another poster, however, says that Egan writing short story fiction, but rather ‘a narrative poem’: “I’m convinced Twitter and short attention spans will be the saving of poetry as a living form”.

You can catch up with Egan’s tweets on the New Yorker.

One thing you maybe don’t want to do the Los Angeles Times points out is tweet about writing your novel as one thing many of us can testify to Twitter sucks up time and is calls to mind the old joke about two writers/jourrnalists sitting a bar: One says to the other ‘I’m writing a novel’. The second replies ‘Neither am I’:

“Twitter is a connector, a place for micro-stories, an Internet water cooler. As a result, it is a tempting procrastination tool, particularly for people who are inclined to be sitting at a computer, fingers poised over a keyboard.Like, for example, hopeful novelists.

Just go to @WrkOnMyNovel for proof. The new Twitter account gathers tweets that reference working on novels — which, of course, someone is not doing with tremendous focus if they’re tweeting about it. In fact, some who tweet about working on novels admit they’re in the middle of doing something else entirely: Watching “Dr. Who,” PBS or “Gilmore Girls,” filling Etsy orders, spending time on Pinterest.

Others who tweet about their writing environments do seem to be writing, or at least ready and set for it. Coffee shops and chai are popular. There is the occasional glass of red wine. One writer, @sonyazombiee, tweeted: “Thinking of working on my novel all day in bed tomorrow. Hmm,” which does sound rather pleasant.”