In All My Writing, Am I Forgetting How to Write?
By: Jeffrey Steen
Tags: Writer, Writers On Writing, Writing, Writing Life, Writers Life

Image by Лариса Мозговая from Pixabay

I make a habit of reading the news every morning. It’s not the leisurely, print-rooted exercise of yesteryear; I lie in bed, scrolling through news curation apps, skimming headlines, and plucking insights from quick-hit interviews. I seldom read an entire article.

I hate this.

For years, we have heard experts warn of a digital content onslaught. Advertising alone sucks up much of our attention — recent estimates suggest we view between 6,000 and 10,000 ads each day. Other statistics only pile on: Last year, roughly 500,000 Tweets were sent every day while each one of us busied ourselves creating some 1.7MB of data each second.

Perhaps that’s too big to digest, but this might hit home: In June 2020, research showed that the United States published more than 5,000 news articles on average every day.

In short, friends, we’re producing more content than we can possibly digest.

You see the inevitable consequent, I’m sure. Publishers are focused less on the meat of their copy and more on capturing our attention. How can they get our clicks, our opens, our downloads before the next guy does?

The answer is nuanced but basically comes down to this: 1) By creating shorter, easy-to-process, modular content, and 2) leveraging psychological and emotional triggers.

I’ll leave #2 alone for now — that’s worthy of its own library. What plagues me, however, is #1. Over the course of the last 15 years, I have been forced to pivot from meaty, many-layered narratives to choppy listicles and keyword-optimized snippets.

I’ve become pretty good at this digital-first writing. However, it makes me ache for the days when writing was more artistic than formulaic — when the job of a writer was not only to convey, but to inspire, prod, and question. To take a reader on a journey and quietly encourage critical thinking.

Today, my professional writing is anemic. It says what it says and it means nothing more; it carries little weight or reason for reflection. It delivers a message that can be absorbed through half-hearted skims, then is set aside to collect digital dust. I have even been told to keep my writing to a seventh or eighth-grade reading level. The goal is understanding at a glance; no one has time to look up arcane words.

Before you object — yes, long-form, narrative writing does exist in some arenas. Though by my witness, these are fewer and further between. It is a fading art form.

In my young, idealistic days, I came to writing with a hefty helping of naïveté. I wanted to impact the world around me with the power of words — to inspire change, however small; to ignite emotion; to stoke debate; to prompt reflection and examination. This is the purpose for which I trained myself.

Reflection in young adulthood showed this idealism to be naïve because the world was filled with impactful writers. How could I possibly make a ripple?

Decades later, I learned that my naïveté was more egregious: Writing was — is — endangered; and even in the small space were it remains, ripples make no mark on a tumultuous, seizing ocean.

As I look out on the digital landscape of today, I wonder if my skills as a long-form writer are still needed. If the potential for impact is gone, why am I even writing?

Undoubtedly, this question will come to mind as I lazily lie in bed tomorrow morning. Undoubtedly, I will open the news app on my phone and skim through the latest of the day’s 5,000 articles.