The Death of Long Text Fiction

2009-01-16T06:58:00.000-08:00

On paper, at least. Maybe even beyond that.

Because I wonder whether that really was it, and so we're kind of done, now. It's not just Kindle and Sony's Reader, or mobile phones becoming more competent reading devices: its how I see people interacting with their time.

Ten years ago, a London bus would have been full of people reading books. These days you're as likely to see people texting, watching a vidfeed or playing on their Nintendo DS. When people are at home, they have friends and family and washing up and things to do. Reading is generally the indulgence of dead time, and competition for that time is getting more and more intense.

Reading has to challenge--

Oh who are we kidding? It's not fighting. It's not getting up again. It's dead.

Dead. It's gone the way of young Victorian ladies learning to etch and play the guitar. It hasn't stopped moving, but as a hobby it is in a zombified state. J. K. Rowling may have played re-animatrix for the last few years, with the help of a lumpen Igor in the shape of Dan Brown, but it's dead.

Nobody is paying to read anymore.

Especially not you.

Capeesh?

Is this thynge on?

2009-01-16T04:02:00.000-08:00

Shut up. Just sit there and shut up.

You don't know what you're doing, or why. You're thinking in completely the wrong terms, so just stop it. No -- I said no, you're doing it again -- stop.

Clearer?

Good.

The second person narrative: a dangerous experimental weapon deriving from the earliest days of the English novel. Prior to this, you-forms confined themselves to romantic poetry, where "you" was usually a way of flattering the reader into believing they were the adored "she".

Theoretically designed to encourage reader engagement with a new form, I'm undivided on the question of usage: avoid. About 40% of people in England will be captured by it -- a good result -- but 60% will be repelled: it is an invasive construction. Perhaps less restrained US readers and confirmed narcissists would be more susceptible.

Myself, I'm in the captured camp; I'm pathetically suggestible, but even I have limits. Iain Banks' Song of Stone used a second-person narrative to deadly boring effect. I think its intimacy tricked him into letting his guard down; it ended up as sludge.

Second-person prose: dangerous to readers and writers.

You know what I mean, don't you?

Getting Drafty

The Death of Long Text Fiction

Is this thynge on?