What are you writing? And how exciting is it? And can you be sure it will keep someone’s attention?
Studies are currently being done to determine what the effect of sound bites and multi-content video screenings are having on people. But the real question for a content creator is why do it?
Are you a content creator?
Are you a writer? If so, you are a content creator. You’re creating content for a blog or a book or a volume of short stories or a podcast or maybe a stage, But you are creating content.
And if you’re writing content for a book, how do you compete with social media? Good question.
The reality is …
Do you remember when reality TV became a thing? Do you remember asking yourself, “If these are people being put in a contrived situation with made up rules, what’s real about this? Why is it called reality TV?” I do.
But the reality is that at the time writers were on strike, so the content being created was actually people making up situations and seeing how non-actors would react in those situations.
And then it seemed like they realized the more ridiculous they made the situations the more people watched.
Lesson learned?
It turned out that logic wasn’t actually a requirement for content. Only writers wanted stuff to fit neatly together.
And since then writers have been rounded up, herded into pens and fed scraps and swill, books no longer exist and TV is also dying because now people only watch Tik-Tok videos and Facebook reels incessantly.
Libraries have been shut down and bookstores are all banned.
Wait a minute!!
Of course none of that is true. Well … people do watch that garbage on Tik-Tok, Instagram and Facebook incessantly. Why do you think I was too busy to write this until just yesterday?
But writers still live and work, no longer surviving on mere scraps, they live on passion and desire and the scraps that they’ve left on their desks and the cold swill in the bottoms of their coffee cups.
And books abound, some of them offered in audio format and some in digital format but many, many of them in print on actual paper.
And there are still people reading those books!
And so there must be people to write them. And we, the writers, must make sure our content is ready to compete with the mindless media that is available.
But we must keep hope alive, we must remember that there are still people who have attention spans great enough to consume a story that needs 300 or so pages to be told.
And of course, we can always include a cat picture to grab our readers’ attentions.
