Short (but not to short) is ideal not only becasue of a general shrinking attention span and greater constraints on people's time, but becasue when people start looking outside tradpub for something it can't offer, they are usually on unknown ground. That's why I am trying to write more shorts in the 5-10k range. Shorts are fun, but also samplers.
Thanks for an excellent and thoughtful article. I fundamentally agree with you because I have been experiencing this in my life. And I am not some GenZ kid staring at a phone all the time. I’m an older guy who just loves to read and reads lots of different things on digital and paper. I’ve seen this coming and that’s why I have a provisional plan to write several Novelas rather than one big novel. I don’t see this as a compromise. It’s just people are relating to the content in different ways now. We need to follow the trend so we get seen.
I’m sure you’ve heard that more and more teachers are asking students in primary and secondary school to read excerpts rather than books. We can cry that this as some kind of tragedy, but it is just what it is as cliché goes. Literacy just won’t look in the future what it looked like in the 20th century.
Our friend Phil Rot hilariously marketed his 90-page debut, The Raft, as the first "Micro Novel." Good instincts for the modern reader attention span and the new author adoption curve. By extension, in techbro terms, Tolkien wrote the Hobbit as a Proof of Concept / Minimum Viable Product.
Fifty thousand-word novels are what the majority of readers can assimilate and review.
I recall Bellow’s afterword in the Collected Stories admonishing writers to write “as short as they can.” I think 100-220 is probably the ideal zone.
But at the end of the day, we should just follow what the work dictates.
Short (but not to short) is ideal not only becasue of a general shrinking attention span and greater constraints on people's time, but becasue when people start looking outside tradpub for something it can't offer, they are usually on unknown ground. That's why I am trying to write more shorts in the 5-10k range. Shorts are fun, but also samplers.
Yes. And that's why The Canadian Civil War is a modern classic. That and its socio-political context.
Thanks for an excellent and thoughtful article. I fundamentally agree with you because I have been experiencing this in my life. And I am not some GenZ kid staring at a phone all the time. I’m an older guy who just loves to read and reads lots of different things on digital and paper. I’ve seen this coming and that’s why I have a provisional plan to write several Novelas rather than one big novel. I don’t see this as a compromise. It’s just people are relating to the content in different ways now. We need to follow the trend so we get seen.
I’m sure you’ve heard that more and more teachers are asking students in primary and secondary school to read excerpts rather than books. We can cry that this as some kind of tragedy, but it is just what it is as cliché goes. Literacy just won’t look in the future what it looked like in the 20th century.
Our friend Phil Rot hilariously marketed his 90-page debut, The Raft, as the first "Micro Novel." Good instincts for the modern reader attention span and the new author adoption curve. By extension, in techbro terms, Tolkien wrote the Hobbit as a Proof of Concept / Minimum Viable Product.
The question, however, is not only is it the ideal length, but is it the ideal girth?
Oh I've been meaning to read that guy for a while now.
Great read, been dwelling on similar thoughts as of late
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