Getting past the gatekeepers means fulfilling their
expectations in certain critical ways, and a symptom of modernity is shortness
of attention span. This can easily (conveniently?) be attributed to the 24/7
availability of canned entertainment, music and movies on demand and,
especially the former, in bite-sized (byte-size?) chunks. Nothing very long,
everything sparkling, all-singing, all-dancing, and changing to something else (but
strictly inside the formula) every few minutes.
This can be bad news for the writer, when the public would,
by and large, rather watch than read anyway. How many writers have received
feedback along the lines of “overplays its material,” “could be shorter,”
“drags a bit,” “needs to learn conciseness” or “could do with a good edit?”
These are all subjective impressions which boil down to it bored the reader. If it bores the first-reader it is likely to
bore the subscribers – at least that’s the theory. It may very well be that
first-readers read far more than anyone else and are thus acutely susceptible
to the malady, when subscribers may be less so. The fact remains, writers must
please first-readers, and therein lies the challenge.
What about proper development? If one is writing within the
prescribed length limits of a marketplace, is the marketplace not bound to view
a piece on its own merits? If 10, 000 words is available, is it reasonable for
first-readers to expect the same pace as from a 2000-worder? Surely the space
allows elbowroom for scene setting, character development and backstory in
addition to plot? Subjectivity is very much in focus here, as is the current
patience of the reader. If one’s story comes up for consideration at the end of
a long and difficult day and the reader has just enough patience left for a
foot-to-the-floor, tightly-plotted short with conciseness taken to the point of
verbal transparency, one’s lush narrative of languid exotica will be binned by
the second page because it bored the
reader.
This is the luck of the draw, of course, and who knows how
often one’s brainchild is turfed back for this very reason? If you will excuse
the British Comedy vulgarity, in the last few months I have tried to “write
like a hooker’s skirt – short, tight and commercial.” Telling stories in a very
small space is one way to avoid boring the reader, but is still no guarantee;
focussing on plot to the exception of all else makes for pace but a spartan
narrative with difficult-to-relate-to characters; writing first-person
personalises the narrative automatically and skips the clumsy space-waster of
describing your protagonist, but some markets have started to tire of first
person (and present tense)
narratives, as if this formulaic trick is wearing thin. I can entirely appreciate
that, but if we are not allowed to trick around the demands, we must be allowed
to write “properly” – and we need some industry definition of what that means,
something likely impossible because this is, after all, a subjective game.
True, much of the popular fiction marketplace came into
being as a response to commuters who need reading matter to occupy them on that
bus or train journey to and from work, day after day, and the length of
material for this large market is ideally suited to what can be read in an hour.
That said, there are no few markets which will consider longer pieces, and
ideally their readers’ guidelines should be designed around the nature of the
longer piece. The fact remains, however, the majority of markets are quoting a
sweet spot of 4000 or 5000 words, whether for the constraints of journey time
or the active attention span of readers today.
I can’t help blaming MTV. When raised on three-minute
song-bytes and thirty-second news features, who wants to read stories which
unfold at the pace of (normal? Dated? Old?) human information processing? It’s
sad, in a way, as so much is lost when there is no time to smell the roses –
the ones only the writer can conceive of, and would like to tell the reader
about. The experience of becoming lost in a literary work is in danger of
really becoming lost in the impatience of the audience.
At least, that’s my subjective
impression!
Cheers, Mike Adamson
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