Why Shortform Stories Are The Worst
And I wish there was a toggle to hide them…
Evolution happened over many millions of years or so says science. God created Heaven and Earth in six days, or so says religion. Every book you’ve ever read was longer than ten pages, and while Harry Potter makes magic seem effortless and instantaneous, writing the books was anything but. What I’m trying to say is, there are no short-form stories. The atomic blast at Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have swept across the cities in a split second, the story of the disaster, however, spans many thousands of pages. There are no short stories, just lazy writers.
It’s lazy, and you’re wrong!
Since the dawn of Twitter, people have become experts at being bad at writing anything longer than a few hundred characters and therefore also lazy enough to read anything that spans across two paragraphs or more. Others went even further and decided to bastardize the meaning of paragraphs and sentences and just call sentences paragraphs. 🙄 And thus was born the three-paragraph article composed of exactly three sentences, akin to a three-stroke handjob with no happy-ending. Lazy writer. Unsatisfied reader. 😢
The premise is wrong. In video — where the concept of short-form comes from — things are very different. The incredibly obvious detail that a picture’s worth 1000 words seems to be missed entirely. A one-second video contains on average 30 frames. That would make a 30-second video, 900 frames, each of those frames being a picture. Yeah! Video just pictures. Tons of them! Who knew!?! If we go by the saying that a picture’s worth 1000 words, a 30s video would result in 900.000 words! Now, even I’ll agree that feels a tad excessive. I wrote a novel (unpublished for now) of 400 pages and took just over 90.000 words, so realistically a 30s video would not take more than 3000 words.
Where am I going through with all this bloody math? Simple. Video can be short-form because it’s video. Stories cannot be short form because the 30s or 1-minute read is not a story. The format itself is unable to allow for it. But I’m sure you’re ready to jump and refute my theory and show me countless examples of short-form stories that potentially you yourself wrote. I’m sure I’ll either find that they’re not short-form or that they’re, well — no offense — terrible and provide no real value.
Shortform is the bastard child of literature and journalism that nobody asked for.
The overwhelming majority of short-form I have read falls into the below categories:
- A tweet, a quick tip, some random thought with a bit more fluff around it just so it spans over more than a sentence. How bloody desperate are you to make a few extra cents to stoop so low? I guess everyone who can write three sentences is now a writer.
- Someone selling something. Just marketing nonsense for the gullible.
- Abridged versions of product-related articles. They’re like a keyword farm meant for nothing more than high ranking on search engines.
Everything else is not short form and already has a name. It’s probably called a poem, tutorial, abstract prose, philosophy, blurb, etc.
Self-serving and pointless
The biggest disappointment comes from stumbling upon an intriguing headline only to see a mishmash of a handful of ridiculously spaced sentences, quotes, and irrelevant formatting that say either nothing or something so incredibly obvious, it’s an utter waste of the internet. Well done wasting another watt of your readers’ electricity. Keep doing that, one of them might just send you the bill at the end of the year! 😈
And all that for what? For a few more extra reads? Was it really that hard to put 30 minutes more effort into it and either write something meaningful or collect some of those short “whatever” you absolutely had to share with the world, and turn them into at least a listicle? — though I have mixed feelings about those too and I avoid them as much as I can.
I must ask every writer — and I do this rhetorically as well, every time I am about to write an article — what is the point? Are you writing a piece to make a few more bucks, or are you trying to create genuine value for your readers and get rewarded with some engagement and a few bucks?
Is your writing’s objective money, or is it reader satisfaction? The former is a short-term business strategy, the latter is a potential life-long career.
What I find almost disgraceful is that very often the answer will be “short-term business strategy” and in doing so, what gets promoted is not good writing, but a short attention span. Deep down, I actually don’t believe a short attention span exists organically. I think marketers and so-called writers created it in an attempt to squeeze the most money out of the least amount of effort. They call it efficiency. I call it lazy, exploitative, and harmful in the long term.
It’s harmful to readers, it promotes less and less quality writing and degrades platforms over time. When readers see more and more “short-form” writing with no real message or substance that provides no real value, they’ll go somewhere else where the headline isn’t longer than the actual body of the story.
Perhaps I’m a snob, but I see shortform as a literary fart, and I have yet to experience a fart that smells good.
LE and further reading…
There are som strong voices challenging my view on this topic. I welcome that, and in doing so I deconstructed some of the pro shortform arguments.
I love writers and I love writing and here are a few more stories just to prove that…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!
