And what the book needs, the way the book wants to be, that's my job, those are my concerns and that's what I focus on. I am first and foremost a servant of the book. My job is to make the book that I have conceived as good as I can and. but it isn't anything I can profitably think about. I am aware - I won't pretend I'm not aware - that some of my readers have problems with genre. It isn't my business to really look beyond the rectangle of my notebook or the rectangle of my laptop screen. On readers being critical of him mixing literary fiction with fantasy

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. 'The more demonic and torturous the straitjacket is, the more audacious the act of escapology has to be to get out of that straitjacket and if all goes well, that audacity, that escapology, turns into an original manuscript, something not quite like something you've read before.'Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Slade House Author David Mitchell

'I like what I had to do to circumvent restrictions,' he explains. Mitchell says writing 140 characters at a time was a challenge, but it pushed him creatively. Then he thought about using the account 'as a vehicle for fiction,' and he started to get excited. 'I was a little bit embarrassed at having this Twitter account that my publisher really was only ever using to publicize bookshop appearances,' he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. Mitchell admits that he wasn't much of a Twitter user before he began Slade House, a novel about two soul-sucking vampires. Maybe that's why, in 2014, he began sharing his newest novel in a series of tweets. When it comes to writing, David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, likes a challenge. Author David Mitchell's Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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