Here’s what I know: nearly everyone believes that the average person has lost the ability to focus. Blame it on streaming services or incessant phone pings or just the ever-increasing speed of life—it is more difficult for many people, it seems, to sustain focus on a single task. Even moments of entertainment are derailed by distractions in today’s world, so that enjoying a novel or film or concert doesn’t preclude the occasional scroll through old texts and emails and updates, not always for a purpose, but simply from habit.
Here’s what I don’t know: should writers take these social changes into account when they craft sentences? Writers obviously want to be read, and if readers are sidetracked as easily as squirrels in a storm, if they crave sentences that are shorter and swifter and clearer, perhaps that’s simply how the language has evolved. Even if a writer has lofty goals, to persuade, to stir passions, to craft sentences that are life-affirming, the competition for a reader’s time always includes another glance at the phone, the ever-shortening video, the latest alert. To scream at the culture and demand change is always to look a bit foolish—so are some writers right to conclude that even literary novels are now required to drive forward just a bit faster, to include just a bit more suspense, and have each sentence come with a buffer against the ever-present potential for distraction?
It is useful to remember that contemporary reactions to a novel often differ from how later generations react to the same novel, and this discrepancy can be a measure of shifting tastes. When Gustave Flaubert meandered through the countryside in Madame Bovary, portraying all the residents in staggering detail, his novel was perceived as scandalous, even suspenseful, a shocking story of adultery that compelled 19th Century readers to keep flipping pages—yet many readers today find those same details maddening, and deem his descriptions of small town life an unnecessary slog that deviates from the essential story. Now these contemporary readers are certainly wrong, but my opinion about Madame Bovary doesn’t (unfortunately) shove that commonplace reaction away; perhaps this quintessential and irreplaceable novel has lost, for those caught in the pull of a faster world, its thrust.
What’s unresolvable for writers, however, is that many worthwhile destinations come after hardships: memorable books challenge your sensibilities and that’s a confrontation that’s not always pleasurable. Only by laboring past your usual desires and ignoring the sirens’ call can you reach the endpoint. So a writer who is required to provide the incessant jolts of pleasure that’s found in every mindless swipe on a phone is caught in a bind. That writer can’t ever stray too far from the familiar, from the pre-approved pleasure, from the discoveries that don’t require any strain. If a reader expects nothing but merriment page-after-page, that’s one guarantee that the pages won’t reveal anything new, that our literature will never push past expected pleasures and comforting biases and our most agreeable beliefs.
Attempting to craft original sentences has always been a formidable task, as the commonplace impulse, the most human impulse, is to recoil from the unfamiliar. To sit and absorb all the intricacies of a small provincial town in France while reading Madame Bovary with its endless cataloging of norms and routines and characters forces you to inhabit the constrictive, unmanageable life felt by the character of Madame Bovary. And most readers, fully accustomed to our most pleasing distractions, would rather avoid that confrontation. What is groundbreaking in literature is almost always felt as tedious, confounding, or without purpose. And that means that bringing readers from the known and into the unknown presents writers with a paradox: only those readers who have no need for the journey will keep turning the pages.
When I contemplate my own reading habits, I know that having the outside world dissolve from my awareness has, without question, been the trigger for my most profound literary memories. Of course there’s no real surprise in claiming that attention is a prerequisite for submerging into a sentence. To be captured by vivid and vibrant notes on a page requires, almost certainly, more than a bit of concentration. When I was a child, I didn’t exactly plan those moments, but I can remember the first time the world dropped away and I finished a novel in one sitting, just as I can remember my shock when I finally looked at the clock. To remember it today, that experience appears fragile, accidental, an unexpected outcome during an otherwise forgettable night, which occurred without any pings or beeps or ability to check a screen, but that entire experience would have been lost with just the slightest shove of distraction.
Some writers attempt to solve this dilemma by infusing their words with the world’s cacophony: if today’s world includes distraction, then the narrative should be disjointed, interrupted, as fragmented as the typical day. The critic calls it verisimilitude, the writer calls it lifelike, and perhaps it is one solution—the danger is that these narrative games can be a trap, leaving the writer to descend into a dizzying hall of mirrors that simply reflects the world while forgetting that novels should reveal what’s not seen.
Yet it is always worth asking anew what we want our novels to do. And it is always worth remembering that nothing in the arts is sadder than the artist who complains about the audience. If novels are to retain any relevance for the typical reader, then the contemporary world will surely influence narrative, just as photography changed and is still changing the visual arts. Writers simply have the tricky but eternal job of recognizing that readers arrive to every sentence with contemporary habits—and any contemporary account of those habits almost certainly includes a propensity for distraction.
Thanks for a thought provoking post, Charles. I suppose if writers wish to be read, they should be aware of today’s declining attention spans. But shortening sentences and condensing descriptions remove a powerful literary tool. Yes, editing superfluous words makes sense. But other times, artful exposition and lyrical prose are why I’m reading. I don’t read novels to get a legal brief or quick conclusion. I read novels to enjoy the journey. The artfully composed sentences. The cadence and rhythm. The question you explore here remind me of the late William F. Buckley, who was known for his expansive vocabulary. When it was suggested he use more common words, in order to connect with a broader audience, his response was, “Why should I lower the bar of language. Why not encourage people to aspire for more.” Unfortunately, the train of declining attention spans left the station when social media arrived.
".... readers arrive to every sentence with contemporary habits." I have been thinking about this very thing for the last few months, at first refusing to let it influence my writing, then actually experimenting with micro-fiction -- one-page stories, 50 word stories. They are often my most popular pieces ... which I find dismaying.. People sometimes seek a two-minute read as the distraction between tweets and eBay and Wordle! ( I also see that a good deal of dialog in contemporary films is now through sent messages.) As a reader, I notice that I can still enjoy losing myself in Sir Walter Scott with his beautifully constructed paragraph-long, detailed sentences, but I can no longer tolerate ponderous contemporary works -- especially those that give their premise on the first page and continue to repeat the same thoughts over and over using different words. You have raised such an important question Mr Schifano. I look forward to seeing further comments from your readers and further musings from you on this conundrum.