Forum / Question about emerging fiction:

  • Nv_kid.thumb
    Ramon Collins
    Dec 21, 09:50pm

    On MSNBC last evening, Lawrence O'Donnell featured JibJab's animated "2010 two-minute Year Review". When O'Donnell asked JibJab's founders Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, why they chose two minutes for the animation they responded, "Because that's the average Internet attention span."

    The Spiridellis brothers have been involved with online production and Internet audiences since 1999. Could this be a subtle endorsement for Micro & Flash fiction on the Internet?

  • S._tepper--nov--lighter.thumb
    Susan Tepper
    Dec 22, 03:34pm

    It's an interesting thought and not very comforting to those of us writing novels, too. But the world will evolve the way IT chooses and we are all players...
    Hey-- didn't someone famous say that? Ha ha

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    kim teeple
    Dec 23, 12:15am

    this sounds like good news for flash writers!

  • Nv_kid.thumb
    Ramon Collins
    Dec 23, 01:11am

    SusanT: I dunno from novels. I just heard from a novel writer (3 pub) and her latest has a nibble from HBO as a series. I would think screen writing. The story must move and have sound if it's going to attract the illusive 18 - 36 crowd.

    KimT: It's the way writing is going because it's the way people are reading. 'Nuther thing to consider about writing: MSNBC's morning news-crawl said a quarter of graduating seniors fail the army's entrance exam. Really? As I recall, it isn't a Quantum Physics exam. It's more like "What is Charlie Brown's dog's name?"

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    kim teeple
    Dec 23, 01:32pm

    "What is Charlie Brown's dog's name?" Is this a trick question? Hahahahhaa....I'm laughing but for a few seconds I actually said to myself What dog? So yeah, scary.

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    kim teeple
    Dec 23, 01:33pm

    But in my defense, Snoopy can fly a plane and that is very un-dog like!

  • Linda.thumb
    Linda Simoni-Wastila
    Dec 23, 01:46pm

    Snoopy also dances a mean jig ;^)

    I think there will always be novel writers -- and novel readers. Flash is great, I write and read oodles of it, but after awhile it gets a bit frustrating because I want greater involvement and depth with storyline and character. I want to give a damn. And with shorts I am less likely to be as invested (because along with short attention spans comes short memory) -- I have not become enamored with the characters. Peace...

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    James Lloyd Davis
    Dec 23, 02:09pm

    Novels will be around for a long time to come. Flash is fun, and people like flash.

    People also like potato chips. Doesn't mean that steak houses and rib joints are in trouble or obsolete.

  • Nv_kid.thumb
    Ramon Collins
    Dec 24, 12:57am

    Of course there will always be novels (I'd bet on novellas) and steak houses. The point is fewer and fewer people will read novels, just as fewer people will eat steaks.

    Every time the Reader subject comes up, writers bristle and get defensive. I once noted on a writers' site when I visit homes today, it's like visiting Model Homes. I seldom see bookcases or magazines on coffee tables (fixtures in our "lived-in look" house).

    Immediately, WRITERS began posting photos of THEIR well-stocked libraries that include novels that haven't been opened since college (20-30 years ago).

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    Susan Tepper
    Dec 24, 02:07am

    My house has books in every room even the kitchen. I couldn't imagine a house without books. You can just pick one up and thumb it, and learn something in a few paras, or read a poem-- whatever.

    In fact, "The Linnets Wings" (per Monsieur Ramon Collins) sits on my coffee table with piles of other lit mags and books.
    Flash is fun but like Linda said: sometimes you want to really dig in.

  • Nv_kid.thumb
    Ramon Collins
    Dec 24, 09:21pm

    Our house, too, has books and magazines all over the place (plus two bookcases). But when I visit a home I look for books and paintings on the walls; a modern-day rarity. Indeed, writer-fellas like you tend to have books and magazines on display (thanks for the LW plugola) in the home, but it's not common in most homes.

    I talked to a successful, middle-aged local businessman this week, who said he just read his first book since college; 20 years ago -- What?

    It was a biography of a rock'n'roll star! What?

  • Jalousie.thumb
    stephen hastings-king
    Dec 25, 03:35pm

    i don't see a particular conflict amongst these forms. i think it's possible to do interesting things with longer forms by fracturing them the way micro-forms can so that you're triggering stories more than telling them. micro-fiction seem (to me anyway)a space to think how stories look if dynamical systems really is way of modeling how human being operate in the world. i think they provide new ways of experimenting with time. it's in the white spaces. from this curious little world, traditional narrative forms tell too much; they flatten the world into straight representation because they link actions together explicitly and in the process impose a kind of mechanical causation.

    we're only starting to explore the possibilities.

    i think readers are nice. i think over time we'll catch up with them and they'll catch up with us.

  • Jalousie.thumb
    stephen hastings-king
    Dec 25, 03:35pm

    i don't see a particular conflict amongst these forms. i think it's possible to do interesting things with longer forms by fracturing them the way micro-forms can so that you're triggering stories more than telling them. micro-fiction seem (to me anyway)a space to think how stories look if dynamical systems really is way of modeling how human being operate in the world. i think they provide new ways of experimenting with time. it's in the white spaces. from this curious little world, traditional narrative forms tell too much; they flatten the world into straight representation because they link actions together explicitly and in the process impose a kind of mechanical causation.

    we're only starting to explore the possibilities.

    i think readers are nice. i think over time we'll catch up with them and they'll catch up with us.

  • Jalousie.thumb
    stephen hastings-king
    Dec 25, 03:36pm

    Gack!..sorry about the double post (and the wonky grammar in the third sentence...sheesh)...

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    L. R. Styles
    Dec 27, 05:46pm

    I've been a book reviewer for the San Francisco Book Review & The Sacramento Book review publications for 2 years, and the two most noticeable things about the emerging fiction being published is the glut of First Person Perspective, along with vampire/werewolf teen stories being written. It gets to the point where even the die-hard fiction novel fans among our gaggle of reviewers are growing sick of reading either type. I avoid this dilemma by sticking to non-fiction, for my favorite fiction was all penned decades and centuries ago.

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    Bill Yarrow
    Dec 27, 06:06pm

    "my favorite fiction was all penned decades and centuries ago"
    Love the honesty here. But is it nostalgia or something substantive that makes it hard to disagree?

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    Mark Reep
    Dec 29, 04:00am

    Big yes to Stephen's "It's in the white spaces." And yes, we are only scratching the surface.

  • Mosaic_man_marcus.thumb
    Marcus Speh
    Dec 29, 09:42am

    i'm canning my 250,000 word first person vampire cum werewolf novel now, folks.

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