Do You Really think the Attention Span of Readers.....

I think people absolutely have a shorter attention span. i'm on the front edge of the millenial generation and fairly convinced that I have some form of ADD. If i'm not hooked by what i'm reading, even when i know it's going to get good, even if people say good things about it, i will put it down and pick up something else. Game of Thrones met that fate. i want quick, i want snappy, and if it's neither of those things i want it to snag my attention and hold me through the chapter so the next big thing can kick in to gear.

that said, i hardly speak for an entire generation. and in a lot of cases the books i give up on are the crappy self-published works that someone tossed together and posted to Kindle Unlimited without so much as a skim in for red squiggly lines in Word.

My thoughts on this: most of these shows start out amazing in the first season or two, and then they start to lose continuity and quality as they build a loyal fan base over the years. They cheapen the story, cut corners on complicated plot lines, and get trope-y. then when people finally start jumping ship they cut the cord and move on to the next big thing.

The only exception to that is Netflix; their shows demonstrate amazing depth (anyone else jonesing for the next season of Stranger Things?), and everyone's willingness to sit tight and wait for the next installment speaks volumes about the quality.

 

A good book can hold my attention no problem. I fight it a little strange that you're writer friends are generalizing and criticizing readers. Readers will always have time to read.

 

You can't please everyone. Some people like little detail, some people like a lot of detail. My story needs to be organized a certain way and needs the narratives, details and dialogue it currently has in order to be complete. In the end, you're writing for yourself as well.

 

It depends on the person and the format. Many people have no problem reading physical books, but any digital medium means skimming, and often less attention is paid. Add in lowering educational aims, and societies reading 140 characters at a time and you can see for yourself where things are going.

 

I'm currently reading a book by Gene Fowler called Minutes of the Last Meeting, written around 1950 or so. Its writing style is a bit more ornate than we'd call standard today, but I don't mind a bit ... it's to be savored, like a long meal with friends. I'm also recalling Roger Ebert's maxim on the length of movies: "No good movie is too long. No bad movie is not long enough." Fowler's stories are the same way ... you don't mind them being long and wordy, you only mind that you arrive at the end of them.

 

Paper books can be skimmed too. I think the most important aspect here is cost. Paper books are not free, or cost more, than ebooks. I'm from the time before ebooks and I would always spend some 15 minutes skimming and flipping through pages before I made the decision of buying the book. Because it was expensive, because it cost me money. I don't buy short books for this very reason. I want my money's worth.
The same with music, by the way. There were no Moma Net downloads. You had to be informed and listen attentively to a couple of songs before you decided to buy the album.
Not sure if this is relevant to the attention span nowadays, but I suspect it is.

Unless we're talking about public posts, like blogs and Facebook and Twitter, which "were born" to be skimmed.
It does confuse me that anyone would think 140 characters is enough. For news and headlines, sure, but what if you want to write a real article? A book review? "I hated this book because it sucks. I actually have reasons I could expand on, but 140 characters, so let's leave at that." I don't get it. Who wants to read this? Who wants to write this?

Nevermind. I've just realised who. Don't answer that last question, lol!
Yup, sign of times indeed.

 

rip thread, tl;dr

 

I think people have more refined tastes now. A lot of genres were new when their classics were written. What was gold in LOTRs wouldn't fly today.

Take the T.V. show Star Trek. It is a classic and has a huge fan following, but as a Trekkie I promise that there are tons of time wasting filler episodes where characters weren't developed. Compare that to now, where almost every popular show has a tight story arc that develops over the season, with no filler episodes and with every episode picking up where the last one left off.

I think books are kind of like that. If you read a book in a new genre, you're going to be way more forgiving of filler scenes and lost characters and boring "world building" subplots that don't advance the main story or change the stakes. You'll be forgiving to it because the book feels fresh no matter what. Fast forward forty years and read your 1200th book in that genre. You won't be forgiving to those flaws at all.

As books and T.V. shows get tighter and tighter, writers have better examples to go by, and are themselves influenced by the latest improvements in the style.

I think it is a good thing.

 

In a way, we were taught how to skim & find what we were looking for. It was kind of a form a speed reading.

 

When the original Star Trek came out, episodic television was based on each episode standing alone, so that re-runs in syndication could be shown in any order without worrying about continuity. All that changed with the "mini-series" concept in the 1970s. Now it's almost taken for granted that a dramatic series (and, often, a comedy series) will follow a story line that builds on the last episode. This gives the scriptwriter a little more latitude in telling the story, but requires you to follow the series religiously if you want to figure out what the hell is going on.

Remember, too, that Roddenberry was more interested in plots than characters; the plot drove the characters, and not the other way around. This, too, was in the format of the dramatic series of the 1960s. So his form suited the style of the times, where the plot changed each week while the characters stayed the same, rather than the current style of an on-going story arc in which the main characters rotate in and out.

 

As far as books are concerned, I do think attention spans are going down. Given how easy it is to enjoy entertainment today, a lot of people seek instant gratification. We crave things in short doses. That's why Snapchat and Twitter are so popular. We only need to pay attention as long as it takes to watch a quick video or read a few dozen words. It's why a lot of people love Amazon Prime; they buy something, and it's at their door one or two days later (OK, I'll admit that I sometimes like it, too). Part of it also has to do with some people not liking to be challenged. It's why a lot of crappy books make bestseller lists. There's very little thinking involved.

 

Boring has always been boring, and if that's what the writer is delivering during any of their passages then they've failed. Of course what is boring to one may not be to another, and I think it's safe to assume that the writer fell firmly into the latter of these, otherwise it wouldn't be in there.

Sorry, I don't really know what point I'm trying to make.

 

Good points

 

Wager:

One hundred says not a single person here read the article I posted.

 

I think your money's safe

 

Yep. Hubris reigns.

 

My impression from my agent is that there's two shifts happening.

Imagine a natural distribution, aka a bell curve. The x axis is the preferred length of reading, y axis is proportion of all readers.

The bell curve is doing two things:
Firstly, it's spreading, which means more people are willing to read shorter and longer pieces, there are more 'long tail' readers at the extremes.
Secondly, it's shifting left, which means that on average, people prefer somewhat shorter works recently. The average preferred length of a work of literature has actually been pretty consistent for a couple centuries. I was surprised when I did a word count a few years ago, most of the classic 'novels' are sub 50k words.

However, this is audience specific, and readers in these length segments seem to be fungible with writing strategies. What I mean by that last bit is that an author may be able to get away with the same total length of text in an audience that prefers shorter reading, if the author chops the chapters into smaller page counts, and just makes more chapters. This may specifically be an artefact of ebooks, though.

 

I read it when you first posted the link, but I didn't think it added much to the discussion.

 

You must be joking. That or you didn't really read it.

Either way it doesn't matter much. Like I said, 'hubris'

 

Yeah, but I'm old enough to know that's always been the case. It's not related with decreasing attention spans. Maybe this entire idea of "attention span is shorter nowadays" is part of the vaster myth "youth is lost". This thread made me think about it and perhaps it isn't that much a generation thing. There were always people with short attention spans. The internet caters to that people, but so did light-reading magazines, back in my day, with articles as short as 140 characters and lots of photos and illustrations.
So maybe this is not a new thing.

 

It appears that my response to your post has been removed. I apologize to the administrators if I have crossed some sort of line, but I would appreciate a private message to me explaining why the post offended. I do try to take the rules of the forum seriously, and I hope that my comments were not taken as some sort of personal attack on you or any other forum contributor.

That said, I repeat for the record. I did read it. And I was not joking. If you did not read my response before it was removed, I'll just sum it up by saying that I was not disputing the article's premise, but commenting on how its subject matter has been a subject of long debate in the past.

 

Didn't see the post.

Still don't see how Porter Anderson's brilliant article has no merit in this discussion. And as someone who has had the ear to the ground in this area for a while, I also am curious where that debate was held, since I musta missed it. (These algorithms are a quite recent development.)

As I mentioned originally, the comments were more telling than Porter's article, and why I felt it related here so well.

But maybe we read the article in different ways. I not only thought it added to the discussion here; I saw it as a mic drop to this thread.

In any case, the article is there for whomever wants to read it. Maybe someone will get something useful out of it. I sure did.

The whole game of writing/publishing is turned on its head in recent years, and that is due at least in part to some of the changes in culture and technology, which is what Anderson explained. I admit the opening meandered a bit, but it's a solid commentary on where we stand today. IMO anyone who wants to be a published writer today should pay attention to the lay of the land.

The fact that all this splintering of entertainment markets is being intentionally spurred by corporations, i find that interesting and not a little bit scary.

No hard feelings. Best wishes in your writing pursuits....

T

 

I think it's a huge pace problem. I put down a book the other day because after five pages the scene ended on a weird semi-ending note like you could bisect it and turn it into a short story -- the writer didn't attempt to intrigue the reader with a what comes next we were just supposed to wait for it. I wasn't waiting. Good writing but I was irritated by the writer not bothering to imbed a hint of the next scene into the current scene. Could be an issue of a writer defying anything to do with genre -- that's a genre trick -- but I find it less a genre trick and more a pacing must. Also on a personal note -- walls of text are irritating -- I love prose but if you can't do it like Updike or Nabokov or Lowry why bother? Might as well just pare it down and keep it poetic but clean. I'm finding less can be more.

 

I end my chapters in segways though because of this very topic. A lot of people say "I don't have enough time to sit down and read a book," I have people who discuss how they don't finish books because chapters never end and while they are interested in the story they want to find a good placeholder to stop reading.

My chapters segway into the next chapter through connecting themes. But they sort of end in a way that gives a reader a placeholder, you want to continue reading, but it doesn't force you to continue reading either