I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
I take exception to poetry because it is an art whose muscle is honed for the strength to express as much as possible within strict, stylized constraints. Just like other highly stylized art forms, like genres of theatre or ballet.
But in general, yes. The quickfire, surface-level, use-once-and-throwaway culture permeates art these days - all glitz and no substance. My more recent style is more pared down for reasons above, but I've experimented with and celebrate other styles too - stream-of-consciousness, long rambling flowery language, everything in between.
I refuse to rearrange my writing to "hook" my readers within the first sentence and make it a blockbuster action script, and maybe I won't be able to get published traditionally due to this, but I can't deal with reducing the richness of human experience down to how desperately I can hold onto a tiktok-addicted teen's attention span.
Arts and entertainment are often grouped together, but are not always interchangeable. Not all art needs to be instant gratification entertainment. And the important ones never were.






















