The novels I haven’t finished reading pile up next to my bed. What if this is a good thing? | Hannah Thomas Ossie

TIts embarrassing, but here it goes. There are five novels by my bed, all partially read. On my phone, I browse through 36 audiobooks, a number that pales in comparison to the 46 e-books I have left on my Kindle. That’s not counting the growing pile of advance copies next to my coffee table, vying for publicity, and I’m now a published novelist.

At first glance, these statistics seem to confirm Ian Rankin’s statement. Commenting two weeks ago on how easy it is to lose a reader’s focus when fragmented by social media and the news cycle, the writer said: “Maybe as people’s attention changes, literature will have to change with them.” But as someone who used to doggedly finish everything I was reading, I now consider it a human right to put down a book I’m not in the mood for.

I don’t think this habit is due to my short attention span, but rather to the feeling of life slipping through my fingers. I have always been amazed by the Benedictine teaching: “Keep death before your eyes daily.” Oliver Burkman’s reminder that each of us only has 4,000 weeks on this earth was as terrifying to me as anyone else. However, at what other point in human history did we have instant access to so many amazing works of art, whenever we wanted? There is an abundance of riches waiting for me in every library and behind every screen, and I need to be intentional about where I direct my attention. Could it be that “DNF-ing” (shorthand in the book world for “I’m Not Finished”) is not a sign of a weak mind, but rather a special one?

Especially at a time when publishing (and thus commissioning) remains dominated by a particular social class and its dilemmas. While reading about people different from ourselves can help build the capacity for empathy, we also read to reflect on our lives and our place in the world. Until the books on your shelves better reflect the identities, lives, and interests of potential readers, it can be very difficult to capture their attention.

Of course, some authors We are Writing Successfully for a “Modern Area of ​​Concern”: The Long-Twitter Prose of Patricia Lockwood’s No One’s Talking About This, The tight sections of Jenny Offill’s Speculation section, and the short chapters of Chris Whittaker’s All the Colors of Darkness are all great displays of shorter form and style. And there’s no shortage of writing tips geared toward hooking the reader: polish your first sentence, polish your opening chapter, raise the stakes (higher! higher!), and, if you’re writing a crime, put a dead body on the first page. This is all sound advice – an agent, publisher or potential reader will only spend a few precious minutes deciding whether to go ahead or not. There’s no point in being a contrarian, like the guy I took a writing course who, when asked about the plot of his novel, declared that “it’s all clear after three-quarters of the way.” No writer should subject his reader to a series of 12 works in order to be understood.

I write to be understood, as much as possible. Sometimes this requires holding the reader’s hand, guiding them through an economically paced story. Sometimes I realize that understanding requires patience—and I have to give myself (and other writers) the grace to meander, layer, and digress, until I come up with something real. Jane Allison, author of the craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode He argues that the novel finds new forms, and that instead of the traditional dramatic arc, “other modes may help us imagine new ways of making our narratives lively and real, and to continue to make our narratives new.”

In this sense, both Rankine and Allison agree that the novel may have to change to suit the modern reader, as it has continually done since its first appearance in the eighteenth century (the form we know today). Authors such as Charles Dickens and Helen Fielding may return to publishing their novels in newspapers serially. The following authors may have already released their works, chapter after chapter, on online platforms such as Wattpad, which is visited by more than 90 million users monthly. Art forms change with the times and we have to allow them to do so.

But let’s not say that any changes are all due to shorter attention spans. If so, short story and fiction collections would be considered much more commercial bets than they are now. If we were to follow this argument to its conclusion, the answer might be to not write at all – admitting defeat to VR and AI-generated content in the battle for attention, and letting the robots take over. I’m sure that’s not what Rankin wants, or what most of us want.

Personally, I’m more concerned about the effects of “modern attention span” on my ability to write, rather than read. Then, I’ll go and flip through my sand timer while sitting on a silent Zoom call with six other authors, hoping that their tireless writing will successfully motivate me to my second book. Should a newspaper want a serialized novel? They know where to find me.