Everyone Else has it Easy

I forget what we're blaming for diminishing attention spans these days. Is it still television? Or have we shifted the blame on to Twitter yet? Are we even still decrying the general inability to concentrate on one thing for more than a few minutes without our minds wandering, fingers and eyes not far behind, or is it just taken as a given that anything more substantial than bite sized chunks will go untasted?

I'm a writer, and those who practice every single other kind of artistic expression have it so much easier than I do. Among the finger painters designers I work with, Dribbble is becoming more popular. I am deeply envious of both it and them. I wish I could get feedback in a similar manner. Images lend themselves to quick inspection and comment. The visual is visceral, it elicits an emotional reaction (or lack thereof) immediately. Sure, a great first line does the same, but then you've got to follow it up with a second, and a third, and keep going until you've got where you want to take the reader. And let's face it — reading takes a lot of time and effort.

It's often been commented on on Writer's Cafe — my sometimes literary haunt of little choice — that the only writing that gets reviewed is the poetry. This isn't surprising. Poems tend to be short, hardly more than a single sparsely-covered page, and therefore quick to read, to form an opinion of, to finish with, sum up, and move on. (It doesn't help that the site is populated with writers — rather than readers — but that's another complaint.) There are few art forms which require such an investment of time from their consumers as the written word.

I publish the few things I write in order to get feedback so that I might become a better writer. I write short fiction because it allows me to experiment quickly, and I had hoped that the shorter form would encourage more reading and more feedback. That doesn't seem to have happened. So what's the solution? Simply, to go long. My one full-length piece of work has received more downloads — paid downloads, no less — that all my short pieces together. I'm sure there's some interesting psychology at play here: maybe by taking the time to publish to a store, and make the decision to charge, you're signalling to the potential reader that what you've written has value and is worthy of their precious time.

Maybe. Whatever. So it looks like I'm bringing my plans forward, skipping over the remainder of the learning to write through dozens of short stories part, and going straight to the first novel. Well, probably a novella. Let's not go crazy. And maybe I should actually write it, rather than writing about it...