Hey WTF profs, is it this bad?
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Bringing it back to the original topic, there are probably a lot of parallels here between reading and music, because people have said that younger generations donβt listen to βalbum-lengthβ music any more, in favor of picking and listening to only specific (individual) songs. And the way popular music is being written reflects listening tendencies as well, with intros being shorter and the music quickly getting to the hook. To say nothing of the fact that are fewer and fewer classical music listeners as well.
The common thread is a lack of attention span, whether itβs a book-length work of fiction or an extended work of music.
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I was talking to a book group last week about short stories. Our book for the meeting had been a short story collection, and everybody was saying that, though they enjoyed them, they hardly ever read short stories.
I might have thought that short stories would have made a comeback by now, due to shortened attention spans. A hundred years ago, when they were a huge part of reading culture, it was because of the popularity of magazines. There were many outlets at that time for pulp, serious, and middlebrow fiction, and many writers depended more for their income on sales to magazines than on book sales. For them to become popular again, I think there would need to be a move toward distributing them as single stories through subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, rather than in print. (They're available in those formats, but they don't sell a lot and the royalties are abysmal. Few well-known authors write for publication in that format and few people read them.)
I don't think I'm wrong about the shortened attention spans changing the market, though, because flash fiction (less than 1000 words) has exploded in popularity during the smartphone era. It's easy to read something that length on a phone. One of the early outlets for flash pieces is called Smokelong Quarterly, because you can smoke a cigarette while you read one...they're one smoke long. Again, the problem is that flash fiction outlets usually don't pay, so they don't attract writers who attract readers.
That's a long bit of thread drift, but so it goes...
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Bringing it back to the original topic, there are probably a lot of parallels here between reading and music, because people have said that younger generations donβt listen to βalbum-lengthβ music any more, in favor of picking and listening to only specific (individual) songs. And the way popular music is being written reflects listening tendencies as well, with intros being shorter and the music quickly getting to the hook. To say nothing of the fact that are fewer and fewer classical music listeners as well.
The common thread is a lack of attention span, whether itβs a book-length work of fiction or an extended work of music.
@ShiroKuro This is interesting.
Before the advent of long-playing LPs, people with record players could only listen to three to five minutes of music at a time. Each record typically had two songs on it, one on each side. In the 60s, 45 rpms were pretty popular, ditto situation. So perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
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@ShiroKuro This is interesting.
Before the advent of long-playing LPs, people with record players could only listen to three to five minutes of music at a time. Each record typically had two songs on it, one on each side. In the 60s, 45 rpms were pretty popular, ditto situation. So perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
perhaps listening to "album-length" music is an anomaly?
All good points, very interesting to think about! What about the fact that people would go to live orchestral concerts? (with no video presentation in the background!)
Somehow, I still suspect people had longer attention spans for music than they do now... but maybe that's just my bias!
@mary-anna that was all super interesting, thank you! I wonder how it is in Japan, where literacy and reading measures (like newspaper subscriptions, book sales etc) have been consistently higher than in the US. And publishing traditions are different (e.g., short story collections and essay books).... otoh, cell phone reading is also huge so....
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Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction
I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.
I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.
Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.
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Iβll drift back to wtgβs invitation to weigh in on younger learners. Just for reference, my most recent teaching experience is with grade 1/2 (so 6-7 year olds). Attention spans have definitely been impacted in these young kids. Their brains literally crave fast paced changes. They are fall less able to sustain their attention to a complex task for a period of time. This is something that has been studied in young children over the past few years, so Iβm relying on more than anecdotal evidence when I say this. Generally my kiddos do have shorter attention spans and much less tolerance for boredom than children I taught a decade ago. And yes, I blame smartphones/tablets. I think the kiddos sitting in front of me this year are likely the worst I have seen. Remember, they were born in 2018-2019. So many of them were more likely to have screen babysitters as their families juggled working from home while they were still toddlers. This literally βrewiresβ their brains. Anecdotally, I am able to lengthen their attention span and tolerance for sustained work over the course of the school year - and I believe Iβm getting many children to levels similar to those I would have seen a decade ago. However, I have a handful of students who just shut down when given any difficult focused task. And the kids who shut down are also, unsurprisingly, the ones who talk the most about video games. And they are also the most likely to talk about playing wildly inappropriate games like Grand Theft Auto.
Iβm not in the βvideo games are universally awfulβ camp. I fact, I do believe that they are an incredibly rich art form. Iβm also not completely anti-device in the classroom. However, I do think that the current nature of media is changing childrenβs brains in a way that makes sustained, focused thinking much more difficult. AI certainly isnβt going to help with that trend as they get older.
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Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction
I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.
I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.
Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.
Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction
I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.
I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.
Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.
My husband loves short stories but theyβve never been my favourite. However, some of my most memorable reading experiences have been short stories by Stephen King. In fact, I absolutely loved when he published The Green Mile originally. It was in βchapbookβ form, inspired by Charles Dickens. They were released one a month, IIRC, and I looked forward to each one.
As much as I loved that experience and others I have had with short story collections, as MaryAnna said, I generally donβt get short story collections even when written by authors I love. Short stories do seem to fall into two camps (at least from what Iβve noticed). Highly literary authors (Margaret Atwood, for example, has a number of books that are her collected short stories), and genre authors. Sci fi and fantasy collections of short stories are published all the time, and I actually will read the stories by my favourite authors! But I donβt know why I am less inclined to do so with, for example, realistic fiction.
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@dolmansaxlil Muffin, when teaching kindergarten and first grade, reported the same anecdotal observations as you.
As for short stories, my thoughts on short stories as both a writer and a reader are also anecdotal and subjective. I think science fiction works very well in short forms. I read a ton of science fiction anthologies when I was a kid. Some science fiction stories really are about a very cool idea that's best told in a succinct, straightforward way. Expanding them beyond that idea feels like padding, and the extra material detracts from the punch that comes from delivering the answer to the story question and quitting.
To me, fantasy requires worldbuilding that doesn't work as well in a short work.
Romance can work, but you lose the ups and downs ot several rounds of will-they-or-won't-they and/or they-did-but-was-it-a-bad-idea?
I have to believe that mystery short stories can work, since I write them. Editors give a lot of latitude for mystery shorts, generally requiring that the story involve a crime without requiring that it be a play-fair mystery that gives the reader all the clues. I, however, prefer my stories to have clues and a logical structure, so that's what I write. I find that it's hard to pull that off in less than 5000 words (~20 manuscript pages) and I prefer to have at least 6000 words.(~24 manuscript pages.)
Literary short stories are their own thing. When I like them, I really like them. When I don't, they feel plotless and self-indulgent. I really admire George Saunders and Elizabeth McCullough when it comes to literary stories. When it comes to (sometimes fairly weird) flash stories, Lydia Davis more or less made that arena her own.
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