An innovation in digital storytelling

Monday, 14 July 2014

Award-winning author David Mitchell (@David_Mitchell) kicked off a ground-breaking project this morning with the launch of his new short story ‘The Right Sort’, which he will tell exclusively on Twitter.

In a new approach to digital storytelling, Mitchell will share twice-daily installments with his Twitter followers over the next seven days, with clusters of Tweets advancing the storyline going out at approximately 7am and 5pm. When pieced together, the Tweets will reveal the short story in its entirety.

In the days leading up to the story unfolding, Mitchell’s team used his Twitter account to hint at what was to come:

This morning he revealed the first installment:


To launch the project, Mitchell was interviewed by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (@BBCr4today), where he discussed the challenges of writing a short story in 140-character installments:

He said: “Writing a ghost story in Tweets and working out how change the 140 character limit from a diabolical constraint into (I hope) a narrative asset has been enormous, nourishing fun.

“I’m not a social media native, and I remain an old-school lover of books, but the idea of connecting with readers simultaneously all over the world via their smart-phones and laptops is both exciting and spookily intimate.”

The release comes ahead of the publication of his next book, ‘The Bone Clocks’. ‘The Right Sort’ stands alone as a short story, but inhabits a similar universe to that of ‘The Bone Clocks’ — a world in which the paranormal intrudes and mortality is not a given.