The sin of making people read
I've had to look at a lot of job postings recently, and one sentence in a listing for a media production company jumped out at me: "Today, people want to watch and listen, not read."
First off, I don't think that's universally true. In my particular social bubble, I'm constantly hearing my peers (mostly other millennials) lament that so much information they're looking for is in video format instead of simply written down. I personally don't have much time for video tutorials; I read faster than the presenter can talk, and my patience for jumping through a YouTube video five seconds at a time to find the 20-second segment containing the information I need is, uh ... limited.
But I have noticed there's a peculiarity to being a prose fiction writer, which is that even well-meaning people are constantly asking me whether I've thought about adapting my work into:
- a screenplay
- a comic
- a podcast
- a webseries
- a video game
- literally any format that would not require my audience to read.
It makes a kind of sense. Reading is not conducive to multitasking; it requires your full attention, and these days there are a million other things competing for that attention. Literacy rates worldwide aren't exactly improving at the moment, and the potential audience for my work contains a nonzero number of people who consider reading a difficult, frustrating chore.
But I think there's also an unspoken cultural assumption at work — one that considers prose fiction to be a kind of placeholder, proof-of-concept medium. A cheap way of establishing an IP foothold so the media production apparatus can decide whether it's worth adapting into a "real" format like film. And there's certainly an economic incentive to treat prose like this; after all, most of the real profit in fiction publishing is in licensing rights. The money to be made off selling an adaptation to Netflix or Amazon is much higher than anything an author or publisher might make from book sales alone.
So maybe that's why nobody ever believes me when I say my stories are already exactly what I want them to be.
New on Ko-fi: "Moriarty & Moran Contribute to Community Welfare," Chapter 1
A valet hurried to open the door as their car pulled up to the red carpet. Moran stepped out first, then offered a hand to Jay; the gesture was so absurdly chivalrous that Jay had to suppress a laugh, and there was a corresponding tease in Moran’s eyes. As they handed their invitations over at the door, though, Jay was seized by the sudden conviction that it wouldn’t be enough; the doorman would take one look at him and know, immediately, that no version of Jay Moriarty belonged in a place like this.
But he was with Moran—Eton and Oxford, son of an ambassador, former SAS officer Sebastian Moran, who could go just about anywhere he pleased. Which was exactly why Jay had asked for his help.
The first chapter of "Moriarty & Moran Contribute to Community Welfare" is now on Ko-fi and free for anyone to read. Subsequent chapters will be posted on Tuesdays as supporter-only posts. You can also get the entire novelette as an ebook.
This Week's Links
Business Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her
On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her.
Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened
The bots also struggled with self-deception — basically creating shortcuts that lead them to completely bungling the job. "For example," the Carnegie Mellon team wrote, "during the execution of one task, the agent cannot find the right person to ask questions on [company chat]. As a result, it then decides to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user."
Anti-Trans Activist Nicola Murray Found Guilty of Child Abuse
Murray was a lead voice last week when the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex under equalities law, meaning, for instance, that transgender women, who are biologically male but identify as women, can be excluded from women-only spaces.
Harlan Ellison
-K
