I don’t know if you’ve read about this anywhere, but via Galleycat a few weeks ago I clicked on a link to a downloadable story written in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s author, David Nygren, wrote a story and typed its various parts into columns.

Reactions on the internet have been, um, confusingly positive, based on my lazy web browsing. 10,000 people have downloaded the story. The comments section at his blog is full of praise. Other blogs and sites link to it. Even a blogger for The New Yorker picked it up, though she was deadpan in her post:

A writer has “built” a short story using an Excel spreadsheet divided into three columns: one for action, one for dialogue, and one for internal monologue.

I wonder how tempted she was to put those quotation marks around writer.

Sorry, David. I’m just teasin’ ya!

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