Day #5 of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I've been hearing a great deal about not doing anything as a writer that will lose the reader, because in today's world of distractions, you may not get that reader back. So here is a post from last year that addressed that.
My last blog was about editing, and also touched a little on length. Got a lot of comments, so I wanted to elaborate.
I’ve received all sorts of advice and heard all sorts of opinions—verbal, in blogs and in hard print—about length. Novels, especially for first-time published authors, need to come in at about 90,000 words. That seems to be the sweet spot. This is mostly a function of print costs. Much beyond 90,000 and the print costs go up appreciably. That’s a dollars-and-cents thing. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.
But the other thing I also completely understand: novels, and all books, need to be written so that they can be digested in easy, bite-sized pieces. Short paragraphs and lots of breaks. People in today’s world can only read, at best, in about twenty-minute increments, and preferably even smaller chunks if you can pull it off. And by the way, that three-quarter page paragraph is just too damn long. You’re asking the reader to make a real commitment. It’s kind of foreboding.
You see this in magazines all the time: News is more frequently coming in small, pithy blurbs that can be digested in a few minutes. Articles can’t be too long or you will lose the reader. The same is true for television, although TV is more a part of the problem.
I credit all of this to the reality that we have become a nation of people with ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder—and it’s here to stay. This is largely attributable to the web-enabled cell phone, or smartphone. We now have his little gizmo in our pocket that allows us to hook into the wired world at any time. We can access the internet, Facebook, Twitter. We can text our friends (often for no other reason than to say “What’s Up?”). I sit in restaurants and often see an entire family at another table, each preoccupied with their cell phones.
And, geez, now we can also take pictures and video! A couple of years ago I ended up, quite by accident, in the middle of a stand-off between police and a mentally deranged person. Shots had been fired and police were advancing on this car in the middle of a crowded boulevard. Parents were on the ground covering children. And in the middle of it all, two guys were out there with their cell phones, recording video. I have no doubt that within fifteen minutes they had uploaded it to their YouTube account and posted on Facebook.
By the way, I’ve been guilty of all of these things, in one form or another.
All of this is by way of saying that we, as writers of fiction, are in a constant battle for the attention of the reader—much more than previous generations of writers. It’s our reality. We have to create stories that can be told in short paragraphs with lots of breaks. Our competition is not other writers. Our competition is a vibrating cell phone, the latest post on Facebook, and the new release of Modern Warfare.
We need to create stories that fit our readers’ lifestyle.
See ya’ later.
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