Some 22 years ago, Poynter senior scholar Roy Peter Clark tried an experiment in the pages of his hometown paper, the (then) St. Petersburg Times. Over the course of 29 days, the paper published short installments of a serial narrative he wrote titled “Three Little Words.”
It told the story of a couple’s struggle to come to grips when he uttered the words, “I have AIDS.” The content and form of publishing were both praised (novel and inviting) and criticized (graphic and annoying) at the time.
Clark even used a then-prevalent technology called audiotext to record a phone message meant to catch readers up if they missed a chapter.
How things have changed.
Flash forward to March 9 of this year, when a new serial narrative started flashing across Twitter timelines. It caught our eye when ProPublica reporter David Epstein retweeted it with this comment: “ok, this is a towering use of twitter.”
Written by an artist and writer in Salt Lake City named Candace Jean Andersen, it started with a request:
In true Twitter fashion, the responses and subsequent revelations took off from there, with Andersen giving the tweet’s followers a what’s-gonna-happen-next journey for the next six days with a thread of 34 tweets.
What follows are some classic writing techniques that we noticed throughout the thread. You can read the entire story here in a Twitter Moment.
(You’ll note, too, as you read that there are also tones of the recent New York Times effort called “Overlooked,” which is documenting under-covered women and people of color.)
Let’s get started.
With clues from responses that come in from those retweets, she steadily builds her story:
As the story ebbs and flows with new clues, Andersen keeps asking questions that she thinks will lead to the identity of the Mystery Woman.
And then comes some foreshadowing:
And then at a strategic moment, she introduces some new characters:
The lost archives turn out to be the break she was looking for as she leads up to the big reveal:
As she tweets excitedly, Andersen offers transparency by posting her source materials:
Having found her elusive whale biologist, Andersen revels in sharing information about her:
And then, her happy ending:
And an epilogue, because she is, after all, a member of #VisibleWomen on Twitter:
