The novelist’s art of the tweet is brought to book

It’s a long way from inception to completion, unless you’re artist and programmer Cory Arcangel, and your book is made up of other people’s tweets about writing a book

The Inception Button should be used sparingly but when called for, it can be highly effective. Located at inception.davepedu.com, it does one thing: plays the sound from Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, which signifies that a new dream – a new level of complexity – has begun. (The sound is, in fact, a massively amplified and condensed note from Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, suggesting that despite what follows, nothing is truly new.)

In 2011, artist and programmer Cory Arcangel created a bot which retweeted people claiming to be “working on my novel”: “cooking dinner, drinking a glass of wine while working on my novel.” (@VivaLaBelle1985, 6/12/12). “Working on my Novel and watching Scary movies :)” (@Donelljackson, 3/10/12). So far, so enjoyably Twitter. Now Penguin Books is publishing a selection of these tweets on paper under the title, yes, Working On My Novel. Inception sound!

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