Are Long Works Dead in the Water

Yesterday, I posted my first piece of fiction in a while, “Sanity”. It’s actually a story that I had written back when I was sixteen and taking my first real fiction writing class. I call it a short story but, really, I had intended it to be the first chapter in my very first novel. It never took off for reasons that I’m still struggling to understand…but I digress. I dusted it off yesterday because I thought that it wasn’t fair for it to never see the light of day again, especially since it was the first story that I had true pride in. So, after scouring every place I could think of until I finally found it (thank the universe I did), I transferred it to Vocal and posted it, as is.

Does it still need work? Yes, of course. I can see a million problems with it now. But I wanted it to be seen and to get some fresh feedback on it after seventeen years in the metaphorical drawer.

The problem is not that it needs work. The problem is, looking back, that it’s already dead in the water, at least on this platform. Why? Because it’s far too long.

At over 9,000 words, “Sanity” clocks in at thirty-nine minutes on Vocal’s reading time. I did not even think about that possibility when I went to post it. After I did, I saw what the reading time was and figured, hey, someone will still probably read it, right?

So far, that has not been the case.

Not a single read, even though I usually get at least one within an hour of posting a piece.

I keep trying to tell myself that it’s a longer story, so it will probably just take longer for people to get around to it. Yet there is another voice inside of me saying—would you?

I am guilty of skipping out on pieces that are shown as longer reads. Ten minutes is pushing it, so why would I read a thirty-nine-minute story? Heck, I even have a problem with keeping myself motivated to read multi-story pieces. I’m sure that I’m not the only one on this platform with the same problem.

Some of my least-read works, in addition to my earliest stories, are often my longest and my multi-story pieces. Some of these include “The Hijacking of the Siberian Bullet” with only four reads, “Adventure Planet, Chapters One and Two” with no reads, and “Beautiful Dreamer, Parts One through Three” with no reads. All of these are over ten minutes long, and the latter two are multi-part stories (“Adventure Planet” being incomplete). I also noticed that I lost readers going from the first part of “La Belle Fatale” to “La Belle Fatale, Part Two”.

So, does that mean that longer pieces—including multi-story pieces—are just doomed on this platform?

As it is an online platform, one would certainly expect shorter pieces. It’s just the norm for articles published on the internet. But does that mean that anything longer is immediately dead in the eyes of the reader?

As one of those readers, I can admit that I am a fairly busy person, so I do find myself skipping out on the longer pieces—not because I want to, but because I have to. Since I’ve been on vacation this past week, I have been taking in more pieces, even some longer ones, but once I return to my normal schedule, who knows what that will mean for my reading?

I could fall back on the typical scapegoat and say that technology has given people shorter attention spans, but I would like to believe that that is not entirely true. Sure, maybe some people have shorter attention spans now because of social media and the like, but I would like to think that avid readers are not like that. I think that they still consume as much reading material as they can—for as long as this busy, go-go-go world will allow them to.

Am I giving up on my longer pieces? No, I’m not. “The Hijacking of the Siberian Bullet” has received much praise from the people who actually read it (at least a couple of whom, unfortunately, are no longer on Vocal). “Sanity” impressed my classmates, many of whom were college-aged writers when I was just a high schooler. So, I will press forward with my longer works, on here or elsewhere.

Does that mean I think that longer works are truly dead on Vocal? Perhaps. But only if we give up on them. I will try my best to revive them—will you?