After skimming through the fifth long-form article about the increase in bite-sized consumable writing made for the short-attention-span—dare I say “millennial”—crowd, I became scared for my own tenacity. Would the 15-year-old me, the one who had read the LotR cover to cover, be horrified by this balding humunculus with twice the age and—if you’d believe the articles—half the attention span?
No, he would not. I can write that with confidence of a man who has just burned through the first two Dark Tower books exclusively while riding the subway. Get in at Union Station, actually sit down to read at Gallery Place, blink and I’m done with a chapter or two and arriving at Bethesda.
Stephen King is a hell of a writer, you see, and most of what you can find online—this blog post included—is derivative crap at worst, well-written nonsense at best. My brain jumping from text to text was its way of saying Dude, why are you punishing me with this drivel? Just get us a good book. So I did, and the percieved length of my metro commute has decreased by two orders of magnitude. Which is a convoluted way of saying that time flies when you’re having fun. See above re: quality of online writing.
But if you’ve never read a book in your life and are now devouring Buzzfeed like a horsefly in a manure factory—sorry, there is no help. It is you.