David Mitchell, the British novelist whose books include “Ghostwritten” and “Cloud Atlas,” had a surprise for admirers of his work on Monday. Mr. Mitchell, who lives in Cork, Ireland, logged onto Twitter and began sending out a new short story, 140 characters – Twitter’s limit – at a time. The Guardian reports that Mr. Mitchell expects to devote 280 tweets, delivered over the next seven days, telling the tale, which focuses on a teenage boy who has found his way into his mother’s Valium stash.

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) 14 Jul 14

To keep the story uncluttered, he set up a new account @david_mitchell, specifically for the project, and he spent the day, with some breaks, telling his tale at Twitter’s labored pace, interrupting the feed only to retweet relevant items, including a link to an interview with BBC Radio 4, in which he explained what he was up to.

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“I’m not really a social media animal,” he said in the interview, adding a note of skepticism about the value of social media generally, saying that: “I don’t want to add to this ocean of trivia and irrelevance; it’s already vast and deep enough. And if I find a really beautiful, or imperishable or true thought, basically I’m too miserly to want to give it away for nothing – I want to keep that and put it into the mouth of a character.”

So why is he is he using this unwieldy medium?

“I’ve got a new book, ‘The Bone Clocks,’ coming out in September,” he said. “I’ll be doing some events to promote that book, and my publicist persuaded me of the logic of having a Twitter account so at least we could tell people of these events. But it somehow bothered me, a little bit, that I was using this Arab Spring-size technology just to say, ‘Hi, I’m going off on the road, please come see me and buy my book.’ It seemed a bit cheesy, really. So I thought, how can I sort of find a use for it? And this led me to fiction.”

Twitter makes more sense, he suggested, when you consider that his narrator is high on Valium: the 140-character bursts characterize his character’s thoughts. It was a challenge, he said, to write that way, and so far, at least, he has mostly been able to resist the temptation to break sentences over more than one Twitter post.

“With Twitter,” he said, “it’s less like a balloon flight, where you look down and see the page of text and more like a train ride, with a very narrow window, through rapidly changing landscapes, and tunnels. You can’t see it all at once.”