"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

Twitter Narratives

The Right Sort by David Mitchell 

Having already published his many intricate novels, in 2014 David Mitchell decided to use Twitter as the means for publishing his new short story The Right Sort. The short story was published as a series of more than two hundred and eighty tweets in the course of one week.

     Although Twitter made it possible for a vast audience to access the short story in the making, read it and follow the events, it sounded a bit difficult to follow the tweets published randomly by Mitchell in the morning or at night. In the end, the story was published as a reorganized set of tweets, which made it easier to follow and enjoy.

     Using Twitter as a means of creation might seem impossible, however, David Mitchell proved it wrong by this project and had a great reception by his readers.

Black Box by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, award winning novelist, took over the twitter account of the New Yorker and published Black Box, a novel published sentence by sentence on the social media platform.

     The story appears as a female spy’s handbook: the female intelligence officer, posing as a ‘beauty’, infiltrated the realm of the violent and most dangerous target. The handbook-style of the narration displays what happens to the agent, what her choices are, which choices she makes and ultimately what the consequences of her actions are. Furthermore, this form of interior monologue shows a coping mechanism of a woman who is caught between the role she has to play to fulfill her mission and the emotional self that is violated and endangered by an aggressor.

     Egan’s portray of this spy is thrilling and engaging. Similar to a John Le Carré novel, the reader fears for the protagonist to be exposed and at the same time hopes for more daring moves by the protagonist that lead to greater knowledge. Egan’s protagonist, however, is not fully entangled in her professional life. She has a life away from her job, the wish to come back to a husband after a successful mission, which opposes the notion of the ‘Black Box’. Upon losing her cover the agent’s basic aim is to ensure her body to reach her agency as a black box, a record of her actions and discoveries.

     The limitations of a twitter post create a sequence of short to medium length sentences which add up to 47 short chapters. The jumps from post to post, from sentence to sentence, play along with the flow of the actions. The reading speed increases through jumps but also through repeated beginnings of sentences. The text has a list like character in chapters such as chapter 43. The handbook that is mostly directed at the narrator herself, consists of short commands, observations and choices that match the length of a tweet. 

Z. Lessan & S. Plum