I’ve got a pretty shocking attention spa… Oh hey, look at that!
Online my focus is pretty much non-existant. Something has to be REALLY compelling, interesting or well-written to hold my attention for longer than a few minutes. I’ve always got a million tabs open at one time, I’ll read half of something, flick over and look at something else, come back, read a bit more, jump to something new then remember through all of this that I was in the middle of making a cup of tea and the bloody thing has gone cold…
It takes a normal person half an hour to make a cup of tea, right?
I’m the same with writing things. I like short stories because I become tired with the same old idea after a while and yearn to get on to something else (though I’m trying really hard to work through this and write a damned novel already so I can publish it and make mediocre sales and give copies to all my friends.)
At Uni I hated huge word count essays (though low-word count essays have their own issues, too) because I much prefer to get my point across in a succinct fashion and then go and do something else (okay, that something else usually involved drinking and chips with gravy at the uni bar or seducing skinny fellow students behind the Creative Arts block. How much more awesome does that sound than an essay on Roland Barthes wherein I’d just impart a bunch of hackneyed ideas because I’m not really cut out for academia and just like writing, good times, seduction and fried potatoes? Yay University!)
A poor uni student’s ambrosia. (Source)
Someone once said to me that my blog showed them that posts don’t have to be long. I thought that was weird, because I never thought they had to be. Wait, am I doing it wrong?
Personally, I am not the biggest fan of long blog posts. It’s why I write mine the way I do: short, broken up into easily web-digested paragraphs, the text interspersed with images. I do it like this because this is the style of blog posts that I like to read. A cool little snippet, a few ideas to ponder, maybe a couple of laughs when I have a spare few minutes. Then, onto something else.
Quick! Pick a tab, there might be something more interesting going on…
It’s weird, I can read a book for two days straight, or go for a three-hour walk, watch nine episodes of a well-written TV series in a row if I feel so inclined (I did this yesterday!) It’s not that I cannot pay attention if I really want to, it’s that often, I just don’t. I’m busy. I’ve got things to do.
There’s a sweet fuckton of media to be consumed these days. There’s also a lot of real-life to be lived. I wouldn’t want to take up too much of your precious time with my ramble. I’m just grateful you stop by at all, so I wanna slip in a few notions, maybe make you laugh at my crazed brain ventings or give you some cool junk to think about, then let you be on your merry way.
TL;DR – Blog posts don’t have to be long because of reasons. Yeah?
