smoke and convenience
why your book should be more bookish
Earlier this week, I drove past a store labeled SMOKE AND CONVENIENCE.
Pretty much sums up today’s cultural landscape, I thought to myself. That’s what we’re being served. That’s what we think we want.
I felt ill. We’re not just “consuming content” anymore. We’re vaping it.
Are you familiar with verticals? These “serialized one- to three-minute dramas are basically movies chopped into tiny bits.” Why “vertical”? “Because they're shot to be watched on a phone held vertically, just like your typical social media content.” I’m exhausted just thinking about them. One-minute dramas? From gorgeous, moving, three-and-a-half-hour black-and-white epics like Seven Samurai to the cinematic equivalent of nicotine-laced steam with a hint of pineapple.
Verticals are popular. They’re where many aspiring film actors are getting their first jobs these days. And demand continues to grow. Verticals are a “product,” as McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski would put it, that many young people are consuming (in between glances at their casino apps).
As an author, it would be tempting to follow the logic here. To write shorter, snappier, easier to digest books to match today’s tastes. But in an era of accelerating speed and brevity, books must become more bookish, not less. Insistently bookish. Instead of chasing smoke and convenience with shorter books and one-sentence paragraphs, authors must lean into everything that distinguishes a book from a tweetstorm or Substack note. Length, depth, complexity. The greater the challenge, the greater the reward.
Verticals are narrow, literally and metaphorically. As an author, your challenge is to go wide, deep, subterranean.
It pays to sit with things.
“[Slow television] runs not at the warp speed of narrative drama but at the rate of actual experience,” writes Nathan Heller in the New Yorker. “It is not scripted or heavily edited; it is more concerned with movement than with tension, contrast, or character.” As a paradigmatic example, Heller points to a seven-and-a-half-hour show of a train journey, shot in real time, mostly as exterior footage. Slow TV isn’t something you “binge,” like McDonald’s hamburgers. It’s something you sit with.
Yesterday, an agent friend told me about his renewed appreciation for vinyl. He and his daughter put on Nilsson Schmilsson, featuring Harry Nilsson classics like “Coconut” and “Gotta Get Up.” As they listened, they discovered the album also features several less immediately enjoyable songs. On a smokily convenient Spotify mix like “This Is Harry Nilsson,” those songs don’t make the cut. Even listening to the album on Spotify, skipping ahead is so trivially easy that he would have jumped ahead to the “good bits” without conscious deliberation. Thanks to the stubborn, analog friction of vinyl, however, he and his daughter let the album play and, given the time and space to do so, found new things to appreciate about each song they heard.
Why would we want anything other than smoke and convenience? It’s an easy question to answer for yourself with a short experiment. Spend fifteen minutes scrolling through verticals on TikTok. Then, spend fifteen minutes reading a hardcover book. At the end of each period of time, ask yourself how you feel. Gauge your energy level. Pay attention to the lived quality of your conscious experience.
The same goes for writing. Spend fifteen convenient, smoky minutes “generating content” at a breakneck pace with heavy use of AI. Churn that copy as fast as you possibly can. Then, spend fifteen minutes in a quiet room without devices and write down something you think with a pen on a piece of paper.
Forget the difference in output. How do you feel after each experience? And if it feels better to do it one way than another, shouldn’t that be just as important as how quickly you generated so much awesome “content”?
“For all his talents,” writes John Hendrickson in a profile of Tom Junod, “Tom has never been able to do a ‘surgical pass’ on a story—fix a line there, move a paragraph here. When Granger would send back notes and revisions, Tom would throw the whole thing out and start from scratch. He still does this. There’s an abandoned 230,000-word draft of his book somewhere on his computer.”
The more I read about and experience AI, the more this approach to the craft of writing makes sense to me.
There’s a reason “Gen Z Is Using A.I., but Doesn’t Feel Great About It,” according to The New York Times. We feel extraordinary pressure to “keep up” through unsustainable rates of cultural production and cultural consumption. Neither satisfies. Neither scratches the itch. Only sitting with things does. That’s the reward. That’s why we do it. Don’t let people tell you otherwise.