David Miller: Bone Truth Literature

David Miller and daughter Layla

Up this morning at 5:30. My only time to read and write. Running a Roberto Bolaño story through my speed-reader program while listening to drum and bass. Both at 200 bpm. The story is about a struggling Chilean writer (Bolaño) meeting a famous writer, only in this ethereal realm. Some call it magical realism. But it’s not magic. After enough time in Latin America you realize anything is possible like villages under siege by giant pairs of wings. It’s possible here too. This is all the Americas. It’s just that up here we clean the blood on the streets and keep our elders locked away.


But say you end up falling in love with the idea of this naked land. You go down there. Meet someone. Camp with her beside a Mexican graveyard full of paper flowers. Get married under the warm rain in Buenos Aires. Your parents flying down from Atlanta, joyful and bewildered. Mariachis arriving. People crying in the rain, saying “Dios is watching.”

wedding night in Buenos Aires

And then how quickly it moves to you just working back in the US. Getting up at 5:30 because like the young Chilean writer you think most of what’s out there is shit too. And if you could just get the beats and words to match up before sunrise and the dream-feeling goes away. Not looking in a mirror but out from it. Bee, Andrea, Mom, Dad, Brother Sam, Nana. Bolaño. Everyone there. Here. Time’s up.

- from "Twitter Novel" by David Miller

Within the next 6 months, you will read about David Miller and his real-time novel in the New Yorker, in Harpers, in the Times. His work is just too damn good and groundbreaking to stay out of the spotlight for long.

David is writing a novel in real-time on twitter.com, a micro-blogging website. This is, perhaps, one way in which literature will make the transition to the digital age.

Make no mistake - David's writing is literary. It's beautiful and intimate and real and the bone-truth.

David has been a mentor to me these past two years, even though we've only met in person twice, once in Boulder, Colorado, and once in Buenos Aires, not long after his first daughter was born.

He writes about family, faith, distance and fatherhood, and he writes one line at a time.

Here's the link to David's twitter page, where you can read the novel as it is being written.

David Miller's twitter novel

You can either start at the beginning by clicking on "older posts" or just follow the flow.

Or, you can go to this link, where David transcribes the novel with minor edits:

David Miller's novel - full version

Give David some of your time, and when his novel is featured in The New Yorker, you can say you heard about him way back when.


all photos copyright David Miller.