The Dominance of Loooooong in the Age of Short Read more: Longform Stories Dominate over Short - By Tom Junod on Writing Long Stories -

Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue - www.esquire.com 

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

I would submit that these are not contradictory phenomena but rather connected. Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them — more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more. We understand this because we experience it; as we try to keep up with what's coming in, we can feel things we once deemed essential going away.

What we do not understand — what we only sense — is that even the most fragmentary information is connected to something larger in the most literal way. The very emblem of our contested cultural awareness is, of course, the tweet; but tweets often come with links, and links often come with stories, and all of those tweets and all of those stories are stored in data centers that tell stories we can't begin to imagine. "Data" sounds small; but data, by its nature, is big, and when "Big Data" enthusiasts rave about the "massive data sets" now at their disposal, they are really investing their faith in a new kind of storytelling, an endless tale of all byall, a collective narrative subject not to control but only analysis.

The stories have gotten larger, then, even though we experience them as smaller. And we have responded by making them longer.

It is one of the paradoxes of our age: We complain that we don't have any time. Our storytellers proceed as if we have nothing but. Our directors seem incapable of making a movie less than two and a half hours long, our novelists of writing a book less than 400 pages. And Stephen King, who was once our Brothers Grimm, is now our Dumas, asking if books 1,000 pages long can still properly be called potboilers. In journalism, what used to be characterized as "narrative" or "literary" or "new" journalism is now described simply as "long form," as if length were the trait that supersedes all others. The magazine article, always a supremely elastic form, has at once shrunk into the "listicle" and expanded into the "Kindle Single" or the "Byliner Original" or the "interactive" multimedia extravaganza designed not to be read but rather experienced in a variety of ways, depending on how much time we have and how much we are willing to give — with time, indeed, the constraining variable instead of simply length.

There is some inflation here, to be sure — nobody has ever watched a superhero movie wishing it were longer, and rare is the journalist who hasn't faced the challenge of the digital era by thinking that at least he no longer has to face the challenge of compression. But taken as a trend, the persistence of long form at a time when it's been declared dead is a hopeful thing, not a trend at all but evidence that humans, as a race, are at last learning how to take our own complexity into account as we stumble into infinity, digital and otherwise. And nowhere is the appreciation of our own complexity better demonstrated than in the vast and vastly ambitious story cycles that have come to dominate television. Breaking Bad, Homeland, Game of Thrones, et al.: These, like the bottom-scraping reality shows that provide their counterpoint, show how the collapse of one business model (network television) and the rise of another (cable) inevitably change the way stories are told, for better and for worse. The plight of a genius driven to fashion a story that not only imitated but also replicated the rhythms of real life made for, in Synecdoche, New York, a terrible movie; but something like the same ambition — or the same opportunity — has made for historically great television… television, indeed, that does what movies no longer deign to do, which is tell us something essential about ourselves.

Writers and producers changed the way they made television shows in response to the changes in the way television shows were broadcast; and the changes in how television shows were made changed the way we consumed television shows until at last Netflix came along and started making television shows that weren't television shows at all but rather long, episodic stories we can consume any damned way we please. This is not just how we watch now; this is how we live, and this, with any luck, is how magazines that still tell stories will figure out how to keep telling them in the digital future. The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale — the scale of sample size and of time — will truth emerge. But that's also the premise and promise of Mad Men, and, in any case, it's just another story in itself. Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.

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