"The Right Sort" by David Mitchell

 The short story The Right Sort, written by David Stephen Mitchell - author of the famous novel Cloud Atlas - was posted to Twitter in a course of seven days. The story, which consists of over 280 Tweets, generated some excitement when it first started out. However, later Tweets received fewer and fewer Retweets and Likes. The idea for the project had come from Mitchell's publisher and served as means to generate excitement about Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Bone Clocks. Nevertheless, Mitchell turned the short story into a novel of its own called Slade House, a year after publishing it on Twitter.

     In an interview with The Guardian, Mitchell described reading a story on Twitter as “looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark.“ He refers to the feeling the reader develops when waiting 24 hours for the story to continue. The reader is left in the dark until the next piece of t he story comes online and you finally know what happens next. To read the full interview follow this link. 

     Furthermore, The Guardian published the collection of Tweets that form the short story on their website. Unlike the representation of Black Box on the web page of The New Yorker, the Tweets are marked as such and function as hyperlinks to the Twitter platform. However, the sequence of Tweets is occasionally interrupted by images added by the editor of the site. The captions of these images pose questions like "Could this be Slade Alley?..." and hereby open up another dialogue: one between the editor and the visitor of the page. 

David Mitchell on Twitter: promotion, network, dialogue

Hyperlinks next to the image invite the reader to share, pin or re-post the article, using the image as a cover photo, on platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter. Thereby the added photos become showpieces of Mitchell's short story provided by the editor of the page.

     Ian Crouch also addresses the matter of The Right Sort in his article The Great American Twitter Novel. Crouch separates Mitchell's story from other narratives published on Twitter, remarking that the "best way to read the story was, ultimately, to wait until the whole thing was published." The short story was not designed to be published on Twitter, not intended for its format, but means of promotion of another novel. Mitchell has been quite upfront about the matter. Although Mitchell has not designed this short story for Twitter, his Twitter appearance is not limited to the promotion of new works. He engages with other public figures and fans alike. Indeed, the majority of Mitchell's posts are responses to posts by fans. The author uses the platform to be in direct dialogue with his readership although he does not usually publish his works on the page. To read Crouch's full article please follow this link. 

V. Rust and S. Plum