Electric Literature’s Twitter fiction grand experiment, Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters,” wrapped Wednesday evening. As a whole, I think it fell a bit flat. I’ve mostly heard complaints about the method of delivery, wherein willing Twitter followers were recruited to post the story’s 153 tweets simultaneously. But because the sort of early adopter who would be on Electric Literature’s mailing list and interested in taking part in such a thing tended to fall within a general demographic, what emerged was a lot of noise—the same tweet broadcast over and over in the same circle of followers.

I don’t check Twitter during the workday—I know exactly how far my ability to multitask stretches—and instead read the story in a bottom-to-top uninterrupted stream on their dedicated page. While the piece itself didn’t knock me out, what I found more disappointing was the missed opportunity to really use the medium, invest in the Twitter dynamic. And not necessarily on Rick Moody’s end.

I totally respect what the fine folks at Electric Lit are doing. They’re paying decent money for good work, keeping the size small and focused, and publishing on multiple platforms. Twitter isn’t just another platform, though. It has a weird dynamic all its own, part hive buzz and part deeply inverted narcissism, and for a work to be a true piece of Twitter publishing it would have to address both those facts. What would have really hit home, I say, is a little bit of guerrilla theater.

It would have been easy enough to invent a character. She’d be someone relatively new to Twitter and its etiquette who checks in maybe once a week and stays on for an hour, someone well outside the online literary community. Maybe she discovered @ElectricLit via Twitter’s annoying new retweet feature, saw something amusing, and signed on as a follower. Her main characteristic, though, would be cluelessness—as far as she knew, those tweets were coming from a real person, intermingled with all her other followees tweeting about what they had for lunch, where they were at any given moment, how sucky their days were.

And she would have to get that sudden rush of fake internet intimacy from a random piece of the story—maybe the tweet that went “Kissing a guy with gray hair on the street in front a pizzeria by a bowling alley and shoving my tongue way in, inadvisable?” To which our clueless friend could respond something like “On yr 1st date? Was it daylight or night? How well do u like him? Maybe not all the way in. Have u read The Rules?” And later “I really think he sounds kind of old & creepy. Where do u live? My cousin Frank is in Queens. I could send u his #.” And still later, “Wait, did u give this guy ur Twitter password? Girl I think he’s hacked ur account. Check your wallet.”

Or something. In other words, it would have been a piece of fiction in and of itself with a believable protagonist, reacting to and interacting with Moody’s story. In the right hands it could have prompted both laughter and reflection: on the insularity of the various communities we build around ourselves, on insiders vs. outsiders, on egalitarianism, on assumptions of intimacy, on identity. Not my hands, obviously. In the end I’m more Nice Girl than guerrilla, I’m against sock-puppetry in all forms, and the aversion to vandalizing someone else’s art in any form runs deep (though I bet Lawrence Lessig would disagree, at least about the vandalism part). And I imagine @ElectricLit wisely locked their feed against replies.

But it could have been a fun bit of smartassery, and maybe something more. Taking Twitter out of the realm of interactive doesn’t quite work, but neither is it a way to fully engage in literary give-and-take. If anything, the medium seems like it would lend itself to performance, and maybe that’s the next direction to try. Me, I keep Twitter turned off during the workday, so that’s for someone else to investigate.