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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/09/the-big-idea-justin-feinstein/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60051

What are stories but information laid out before the reader? What if that information was conveyed through multi-media formats and told through emails, newsletters, and other digital means of communication? Author Justin Feinstein has brought us something truly unique in his new novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. See how he twists traditional storytelling methods in his Big Idea.

JUSTIN FEINSTEIN:

I didn’t set out to write a novel told through “found” digital files; it happened organically.

My debut novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is comprised of chat transcripts, emails, TED Talks, error messages, and other digital detritus from a near-future AI company. But it wasn’t the result of some grand epistolary vision – I just started writing a chat between an aging, jaded copywriter (i.e., me) and a hyper-intelligent bot he had been hired to teach the nuances of advertising. I didn’t even know what I was writing, maybe a script?

As the dialogue evolved beyond consumer motivation and taglines, and into larger issues like sentience and purpose, I realized I had a larger story on my hands. Other characters (both human and bot) emerged, as well as other file formats. Every time I added a new element, it would offer its own unique opportunities for character and plot development.

For many months I toggled between writing and tinkering with a posterboard covered with Post-it notes, color-coded for different file types. The modularity of the format lent itself well to this process, which is a normal step for screenwriters and one that, as I learned, can provide much structural value to a novelist. It also helped keep me engaged on days that the blank page felt too daunting. I’d move a note from here to there, or add a new one and notice how it would affect the story. Even in revision, long after I’d dismantled the posterboard, I was still shuffling sections around to play with the chronology and build tension or sustain momentum.

It’s worth noting that while Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is my debut novel, I’ve written both another novel and a memoir, neither of which I was able to sell. For those books, I just started writing and kept going until they were done. So, both the process of writing this book and the format itself were foreign to me, and a big departure from how I’d worked in the past (and seemingly an improvement).

As a result of this newfound process, I became hyper aware of the order of information, its consequences for characters, and how it could guide the reader. For example, a mundane error message might not hold much weight early in a story, but the same error message in a later spot could bring significant narrative impact, due to the built-up context.

It was also fun to explore the tonal potential of these different formats. As anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation knows, company-wide emails are often saturated with an everything-is-fine and nothing-bad-is-happening perkiness that borders on the maniacal. Writing them made the company in my novel, Uniview (“The most trusted name in AI”), feel like a character itself. Since the story is linear, I was able to use weekly all-company emails (aka, The Weekly View) as a summation of what was happening, or at least the way UniView wanted to “spin” it. This added a layer of depth to the narrative, since both company employees and readers of the book knew the reality behind the spin.

Once I had a draft that I felt good about, I shared it with my wife, Julia Fierro (founder and director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and a damn good editor). I was hoping for some validation and slightly worried that I had created a Beautiful Mind-esque monster that only made sense to me. Fortunately, Julia was impressed and in awe that I had managed to write a book with no exposition or character interiority (i.e., thoughts) – a fact I was somehow only loosely aware of. It wasn’t that I had intentionally avoided it, just that it didn’t fit within the structure I had stumbled into.

That said, I did leverage little tricks to provide context where needed. If a character was entering a physical environment for the first time, they could comment on it or interact with it – like how the copywriter in my book, Noah, bumps his head when getting in a car and jokes about his lankiness, or how he later notes that the AI lab looks like a Swedish furniture showroom. He also has a call early on with his therapist, which is a helpful narrative vehicle for getting to the heart of a character’s fears and desires.

But Julia’s main note for me was that the video surveillance “scenes” in the book felt flat with only dialogue and made them nearly identical to the MP3s/audio recordings. It was a great note, and one I sat with for a while. She was right, but breaking the structure and format of the book for only one file type (i.e., by adding descriptions of what was happening) just felt wrong.

Eventually I landed on not just a solution, but what would become a key component of the book. The head of HR at UniView is a bot, Lex, who handles nearly all aspects of the employees’ lives, well beyond their work. The company champions a symbiotic relationship in which its bots monitor all aspects of employee behavior (hence the book’s title) and tailor their AI offerings accordingly. So, I was able to pepper the video scenes with “behavioral notes” from Lex, which served the double duty of describing gesture and movement in scenes, while simultaneously characterizing her through reactions and commentary. And even though she “doesn’t make mistakes,” the few moments where she struggles to interpret sarcasm or nuanced behavior are some of my favorite in the book.

I don’t know that I’ll ever write a solely digital file-based book like Your Behavior Will Be Monitored again, although I’ll probably keep working with mixed media/epistolary formats. But I can say that playing with Post-it notes is officially part of my process now.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Village Well

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/09/the-big-idea-justin-feinstein/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60051