British author David Mitchell is taking to Twitter to publish his latest short story. He began the project today under the hashtag #THERIGHTSORT. You can read the story at this link.
The story is told from the point of view of a boy who is high on his mother’s Valium. “He likes Valium because it reduces the bruising hurly-burly of the world into orderly, bite-sized ‘pulses’. So the boy is essentially thinking and experiencing in Tweets,” Mitchell told The Guardian. “My hope is then that the rationale for deploying Twitter comes from inside the story, rather than it being imposed by me, from outside, as a gimmick.”
Here is an excerpt:
We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’
— David Mitchell (@david_mitchell) July 14, 2014
Mitchell is not the first author to experiment with Twitter as a story telling platform.