Depending on who you speak to, the average person’s attention span online lasts between three and eight seconds. Known by marketers as ‘The Blink Test‘, this is the short time you get to engage your target audience before they decide if your web page is whack and jog on. Bearing this in mind, is flash fiction the best way for authors to make an impression online?
The engagement problem
Your success depends on all sorts of things, including the site’s overall load speed, content, and general layout and design. Optimising any one of these areas is a task in itself (and enough to fill a whole book on its own).
Such a small window of opportunity means we writers should think hard about how to make an impact online. Especially when there’s a wealth of apps and feeds competing for our reader’s interest and offering them all sorts of click-bait and cheap dopamine for their time.
In 2018, Will Self memorably declared that the novel is doomed to become a ‘quaint cultural activity, much like easel painting’. It made me laugh at the time, and in my bleaker moments, it’s hard to disagree. These days, any ‘water cooler’ moments in the office stem from content generated on video streaming services and social media platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok.
Stories and the written word
But there’s also a more optimistic view. Which is that we humans will always want stories. That’s an undeniable truth, and novels are still considered to be the best way to tell a full story from start to finish. After all, how often have you heard people say that the film didn’t live up to the book? Well, it’s true. It never does, and there’s a good reason for that.
The power of the written word occupies our imaginations in a vivid way that, so far, technology hasn’t been able to match.
Done well, prose embeds emotions and ideas alongside an experience or point of view. Of course, these could be explicit or implied. Still, either way, when a writer describes events through writing, a reader sees the intimate details that illustrate a character’s perspective. Then, combined with references to emotional codas, they can taste the experience and resonate with what it means.
Engagement with fiction online
Now, I say all this, but reading fiction online feels different. Like it’s accompanied by much more background noise. Unless it’s presented within an app like the Kindle, a laptop or phone screen doesn’t lend itself well to dense paragraphs of text.
As a result, copywriters often write websites in broken sentences and short paragraphs, while email copy is deliberately made to be childlike and easy to understand. It sounds harsh, but the data proves it. Most readers will switch to something else if the text requires too much effort.
My own hunch is that it’s partly to do with context. We make time to read a book. Carve out a portion of the day where we’re alone with the words. Or at least put on our headphones or draw the curtains while we give the text our full attention. But when we’re on our phones or laptops, we’re so used to surfing and multi-tasking that we engage wholly different areas of our brains.
As I say, this is only a hunch.
Flash fiction is perfect online
But if reading short fiction on the phone seems unrealistic, flash fiction feels just about right. I love refreshing the pages of Daily Science Fiction each day, for example. Or reading M. John Harrison’s blog roll whenever it’s updated. My only wish is that there was more.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never lose my love of novels. Or longer form ‘short’ stories. But as a writer and reader, flash fiction feels like its the perfect type of story to be consumed online.
This then begs the question: is flash the future of online fiction? Some final frontier, at least with regards to stories? Or am I wrong? And have you written any? Where would you read or publish it if you did? Answers below the end of this sentence please.