Long-Form Writing in a TL;DR World

Long-form writing is a dying art. In a world that has the attention span of a fruit fly with ADHD, the superficial has eclipsed the substantive at incredible intellectual and cultural cost. Content is a buzzword—*smacks fruit fly*—that employers, brands and platforms throw around like glitter. Like glitter, the content might be sticky, but it can also be irritating and end up everywhere except where it belongs.

Like, I dunno…in long-term memory? Where it can make a lasting impact?

We’re producing mountains of material designed to capture attention, but how much of it is designed to be remembered? Maybe it’s because I’ve always been a reader. Perhaps it’s because, before YA was its own publishing category, my generation was inhaling Stephen King’s The Stand, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Clavell’s Shogun.

V.C. Andrews was proof one didn’t need TikTok to be addicted to deeply disturbing content. We had long-form emotional damage and couldn’t wait for the next installment.

Those of us who grew up before the Digital Age was in full-force had comparably incredible attention spans. Was it something in the hose water? Maybe. Or, maybe long-form writing trained mental discipline, patience, and attention to detail.

Trust me, when you were reading a story that spanned almost thirty years, two generations, and literally fourteen POVs over almost twelve hundred pages…you kinda had to pay attention or the story would unravel and make zero sense.

(Note: TL;DR is Too Long Didn’t Read just in case…because you know it’s “faster”).

Long-Form and Neuroplasticity

In my book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World, I spend quite a lot of time explaining just how the human brain responds to its environment (so if you want all the research behind this check out the book). Oral cultures have prodigious memory. Why?

Because they have to.

Since nothing is written down, stories, lessons, information is passed down by speaking and there’s a heavy emphasis on memorizing with perfect exactness.

***Modern fMRI imaging demonstrated this with the Aborigines.

Once humans developed writing, we see an explosion in abstract thinking. Again, why? Because twenty-six letters forming every conceivable notion in human imagination is, by definition, abstract. As a consequence, memory centers shrank and abstract thinking centers started taking up more space.

We don’t see a massive shift until after Gutenberg.

Great, now EVERYONE can be published.

But seriously, with the advent of the printing press. books were no longer a luxury item fit only for royalty and the wealthy. Books, newspapers, pamphlets, etcetera increasingly entered our learning and entertainment sphere. Humans started reading…a LOT. Newspapers went bonkers in the 19th century and competition was fierce. Multiple papers, several editions throughout the day, no dumbed down vocabulary…and all of it in SIX font.

Radio arguably altered the human brain again and we started doing better with cut-scenes and multiple POVs. POVs tightened once film went maintream. Instead of the super-popular omniscient, we see POV telescope as humans became more connected. From distant third, to third shifting, to first person and now the deep first.

Brains Adapted to the Environment

Ever notice that all our social sites have a FEED? Interesting play on words because the brain isn’t much different than our bodies. Our bodies reflect what we regularly consume. A diet of energy drinks and jellybeans will produce a very different result than one of high quality fats, proteins and nutrient-dense vegetables.

Same with our minds.

Now that we are a global culture addicted to TikTok videos, YouTube clips, X posts (“tweets”) and clickbait blogs, what do you imagine that’s doing to our capacity to remember, reason and empathize? Every brand out there—corporations included—are all vying for attention. They want the clicks, the shares, the engagement so what do they do? Make it shorter, louder, catchier and slather it in SEO.

We all stand, mystified, that people seem irritable, distracted, and emotionally distant, but couldn’t that possibly be a reflection of the modern intellectual diet?

Long-Form Developed Our Empathy

Many writers grew up as readers. We stayed up until three in the morning, desperate to finish a novel only to hate ourselves the next day. Not only because we had to be at school/work in three hours, but we experienced profound loss. Long-form writing allowed time for a world to feel more real than the one we inhabited. Characters were people only better. Long-form gave us LIFE…in distillate.

The clown in IT disturbed us on a visceral level for the simple reason we’d lived (by proxy) in Derry long enough to feel the rising evil. Since we spent time with each member of The Loser’s Club, we were emotionally vested in a wide range of characters and experiences (Black, Jewish, female, fat kid, kid with ADD, the one with the stutter, the boy with hypochondria, etc.). We even hopped into the heads of the bullies where we learned that life isn’t always black and white, good and evil.

Long-form allowed us time to feel what it was like to be an outsider.

The Skin You’re In

Stuttering Bill was a painful character from his POV as well as others. When inside Bill’s perspective, we inhabited a mind that worked so much faster than his mouth could cooperate. Yet, when we pivoted to a friend’s POV, we experienced a different pain. The pain of not only trying to listen to Bill and grasp what he was trying to say, but the pain of feeling helpless when someone we cared about was struggling and humiliated.

We inhabited the experience of a myriad of abuse victims. Bill’s parents emotionally abandoned him, whereas Eddie’s mother smothered the life out of him. As readers we felt what it was like to be the Jew, the fat kid, the weird one, or the punching bag. Long-form gave us time to not only care, but to inhabit a human space in a way that no other form of “entertainment” can reproduce.

In all other forms, we (the audience) are the spectator. Writing, long-form writing uniquely, breaks down that fourth wall.

Long-Form Demanded Much but Gave More

We didn’t have to leave our bedrooms to travel to the jungles of Africa, rural Maine, or the planet Arrakis. Long-form gave the time and depth required to break down that membrane between reality and imagination where they could marry together. Settings had time to become their own characters, characters we sometimes loved as much if not more than the characters.

From Middle Earth (J.R.R. Tolkien) to Cedar Cove, Washington (Debbie Macomber), we discovered imaginary places we never wanted to leave. Various combinations of twenty-six letters manifested entire realities we couldn’t wait to revisit. Whether that was buying then inhaling the next book, breathlessly awaiting the next in the series, or just rereading the same book until it fell apart, it didn’t matter.

Yes, long-form was (is) demanding. We had to pay attention as well as give the story time to come to a rolling boil. Today, we’re bombarded with click bait that only serves up nonsense. The gratification might be immediate, but the payoff has all the substance of spun sugar.

How many of us remember a YouTube video we watched ten years ago? Contrast this with how many of us remember a favorite novel?

As modern writers, we are at a crossroads. Audiences crave the immediate dopamine hit social media serves, but IMO, it’s retraining the brain to avoid content of substance that’s far healthier to ingest. We have become not much better than B.F. Skinner’s rats blistering our paws to get the next sugar hit or shiny light.

Long term? That’s how a civilization dies.

What is the Digital Age Creating? REALLY?

Supposedly AI is freeing up all this time so we humans can create. Instead of drudgery, robots can do all that! Why learn how to write when you can type? Why learn to type when you can just talk into a machine? Hey, why bother talking? We can just implant Alexa, Claude, ChatGPT, etc. into our skulls?

What exactly are we going to imagine if all the building blocks that forge a robust imagination are outsourced? Why wouldn’t every character sound the same if the creator never spent time inhabiting another POV? Doesn’t it stand to reason that we’d become increasingly tribal in a world where search engines cater to serving us only what we like and agree with?

If we can’t give a book more than three pages to be interesting, exactly how patient will we be with others? With ourselves? With life?

Because the children in Stephen King’s It exhibited remarkable patience, kindness, devotion. They tolerated Richie’s ADHD motor-mouth, Eddie’s germophobia, endured Bill’s stutter, and Stan’s rigidity. His friends weren’t just empathetic, they were sympathetic.

It isn’t enough to merely feel and talk is cheap.

The Loser’s Club combined all their money to wash bloody towels for Beverly, instead of spending it on candy and comics. They teased Ben about his weight but damn near got themselves killed defending him from bullies. When Eddie had an asthma attack down in the bottoms, Bill nearly gets himself hit by a car half a dozen times racing into town for an inhaler.

Long-Form Writing and How Humans Mirror

These kids had skin in the game with each other because they were all they had. We find a similar kind of camaraderie in books like The Stand, Pillars of the Earth, Lord of the Rings, etc. In fact, one of the reasons series were (and still are) so popular is because we bond with the characters and the worlds they inhabit.

In these worlds there is no unfriend, unfollow, hide or mute button. Characters have to face the ugliness of life, brave it and defend what was right and true and beautiful.

Since we humans are creatures who learn by mirroring, what exactly is the Digital Age training us to think like? How to treat ourselves and others? And I am not judging anyone. We are all being bombarded nonstop, so it isn’t I don’t have time to read a text, I just don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth left over.

Technology that’s supposed to be making life so much easier mostly makes me want to hide in a blanket fort with brownie batter and a spoon. I have emails for my emails and passwords for my passwords. Instead of just cranking in a piece of typing paper and writing, I have to launch a three hour forensic investigation to find my document on OneDrive.

Why isn’t it opening? What’s the password? What email was I using ten years ago when I agreed to this $h!t?

I’m like too little butter scraped over too much bread.

Long-Form Writing Solution for the Short-Form Ouroboros

I “get” that companies need to make money to give us all jobs and, since the power company won’t take social media likes as payment, that’s good. Yet, I wonder how much of the relentless catering to short attention spans is contributing to so many modern problems that have appeared and expanded at a rate that would impress the Big Bang.

Yet, we live in a world where rage, envy, and lust are commodified. Complex ideas are boiled into memes. Everyone has a megaphone but how many of us have become terrible at listening?

In long-form works, we learned this thing called character arc. We understood that people do stupid, hurtful, spiteful things but they also can change. Can even surprise us. How many people thought they knew Severus Snape but did they? Did they know Draco Malfoy? Really? Some characters we meet and immediately defend them, only to later realize they were actually a monster (Amy Dunne in Gone Girl).

Long-form writing teaches us that first impressions aren’t always accurate, and even if they are, given enough time and emotional investment, even that can change. Maybe it isn’t neat and tidy, like Sméagol. One minute I loathed him, the next my heart was breaking for him. Perhaps a character we struggle to even tolerate ends up utterly melting our hearts (Ove in Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove),

Long-form writing teaches us intellectual humility.

The Digital Age and social media reinforce the snap judgements that long-form writing trains us to mistrust.

Long-Form Writing & Life Lessons

Inhabiting a story not only builds our intellectual muscles–memory, reasoning, vocabulary–it strengthens our humanity. We learn that the world is a lot more complex than black and white. Most people don’t wake up in the morning asking themselves, “How can I be positively monstrous today?”

We all have bad days, bad seasons, make poor decisions, can be selfish, greedy and stupid but those are just a few shades of a far larger palette. I remember in college that almost all the professors I hated on Day One eventually became my favorites. Why? I was forced to spend time with them.

Single-serving macaroni is awesome; single-serving friends, not so much.

Is AI fantastic and wonderful and has a lot of uses? Sure! Yet, if we rely too much on the FEED and on being FED, what are we relinquishing? How can we ever become polished at anything if we remove all the friction? Is it even possible to be proud of “art” when we made almost no effort learning the craft (and enduring the frustrations and failures along the way)?

Maybe it’s time we stopped treating every demand on our attention as a problem technology needs to solve. Long-form writing asks us to slow down, pay attention, wrestle with difficult ideas, and spend time with people and perspectives we might otherwise dismiss.

In return, it gives us something far more valuable than another dopamine hit.

Long-form writing gives us depth, empathy, imagination, and the patience to recognize that neither stories nor human beings can be understood in thirty seconds. Perhaps instead of constantly demanding that writers make everything shorter and easier, we should remember that some things are worth the effort.

Because if we keep sacrificing substance for speed, eventually we’ll have a world overflowing with content and precious little worth remembering.

What Are Your Thoughts on Long-Form Writing?

Personally, I’ve given up on a lot of contemporary fiction (though obviously not ALL). I feel like this trend of hooking early and something always needing to happen has gotten annoying. And this is from the person with the attention span of that fruit fly with ADHD.

Do you struggle with memory now that you can simply Google? Long-form writing always helped me learn topics at a far deeper level and I feel like the click and skim is costing us intellectually.

Personally, I love writing where I inhabit an entirely new WORLD. Last week I read Joe Lansdale’s The Bottoms then reread it two more times because I just fell in love with the characters.

This past weekend, I read Alix Harrow’s Starling House. I’m a huge fan of settings as a character. I also read a psychological thriller that I won’t mention because I didn’t care for it. Sure, it was long-form writing but in the modern sense of sacrificing depth for something new always happening. For me, the world was flat and the characters (to me) felt like paper dolls.

This is why I do a LOT of rereading. I’ve reread the unabridged It more times than I can count is probably healthy and still need therapy after Pillars of the Earth (but now know how flying buttresses were invented).

What are your thoughts on long-form writing? I don’t mind cotton candy now and again, but it seems like we are being buried in it over the past several years. Do you love long-form writing? Settings you want to get lost in? Characters who feel more real than living, breathing people? Do you think readers have gotten lazy, wanting the instant fix/hook? Or am I being too picky?