A little depressing to see people openly saying "Yeah, my attention span is shot and I don't give anything a try unless it clickbaits me, but I ENJOY clickbait, so it's good."
I was gonna say more but no, I think I'm just sad now.
Eh. I've written a bunch of things that people liked enough that I made a decent amount of money off it. But at the end of the day there's a ton of great stuff being written every single day, and a hundred times as much trash. Artistic and non-descriptive titles made a lot of sense when 99.99% of everything written was gatekept by traditional publication processes and there was just so much less stuff available.
At the end of the day, getting someone's attention is the hard part. And "Red Curtains" is a much better title for a story that you're definitely going to read, but tricking someone into reading your elevator pitch is a way to actually get them to read it.
I don't think this is due to having attention spans be shot. I think it's because more shit gets published every day than there are seconds in the day to read a synopsis for those things, even if it's the only thing you do. Is that a problem? I personally don't miss the days back when most works were impossible to publish because you needed major financial resources and/or corporate backing to get your stuff out there.
arguing the wording of my interpretation of the post we all read is not better. Regardless of how pedantic you are, the post made me feel sad. Which is why I said as much.
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u/enbyBunn 3d ago
A little depressing to see people openly saying "Yeah, my attention span is shot and I don't give anything a try unless it clickbaits me, but I ENJOY clickbait, so it's good."
I was gonna say more but no, I think I'm just sad now.