I’m a Post-Coital Fruit Fly

It was a warm and sunny afternoon...the perfect time to boink my secretary, become schizophrenic, and then get hit by a bus.

I’m not a religious person–my in-laws say all that higher education (aka the devil) sneakily usurped my faith.  They pray for my re-enlightenment.  What they should really do is make me watch thousands of advertisements.  Sometimes, I swear, a mysterious entity, be it a he, she, or Jabba the Hut, sends me a miraculous eureka message through an advertisement (and sometimes music videos).

Take, for example, a Secret deodorant commercial.

Secret states that their deodorant can give you “sexy, smooth armpits“.  The word sexy nudged me out of a procrastination nap.  Why the hell do I want sexy armpits?  It’s not like women walk around with their arms raised trying to attract men.  Trust me, they’re not looking at your armpits, sweetheart.

Next declaration: “Secret: because you’re hot!“

This makes my eyes roll, reminding me of the swarmy one-liners that would get thrown my way after track practice.  In a moment of stupidity, my oxygen deprived brain would wheeze, “I’m hot“.  Inevitably, I’d get two or three, “why yes, you are“.  (And no, this was no ode to my beauty.  There was one girl to every five guys on the track team.  Skimpy (but ugly) shorts, competition, and the boredom of the country plus exploding teenage hormones equals you know what.)

Despite the icky adolescent memories, the Secret commercial got me thinking about how so many things in our lives have been reduced to commercial-size bites.  One-liners that may sound snappy or cute the first time but are actually hollow and meaningless.

It seems that people have shorter and shorter attention spans (possibly as short as 9 seconds).  Therefore media (and this includes me as a blog and book writer) is all about sucking you in, hooking you, grabbing you–all terminology with violent connotations–as quickly as possible.  In essence, you have to take the reader/watcher against their will, otherwise they’re just going to brainlessly fall for the next attention rapist.

And don’t forget we have to rape our own lives or projects of all depth and complexity before we can sit for five minutes with an agent/investor/loan officer and see if they’re truly interested in our project.  We have to have a pitch, a hook, to snag their initial attention, and it better not be longer than a sentence.

Don’t have a tag line for your blog or company?  You are so screwed.  How are people supposed to “know” what you’re about.  Because god forbid they have to read more than a sentence or listen for more than 5 seconds.

As for book writing, did you know you have to hook a reader with the first sentence?  Yes, you’ve got one sentence to make them decide if they’ll cuddle up with you for 350 pages.  That line better be shocking, titillating, crude, or violent.  Forget painting the scenery or having a poignant insight.  Nope, there had better be a dead body, or bondage, or a psychotic breakdown.  Better yet,  work all three into the opening line.  Of course, a lot of the time this one-liner is taken out of the book’s context, a throw away line, and has nothing to do with the overall scheme of the plot or characters.

Yes, us writers, we’re liars and charlatans, but we’ve been told over and over by agents, editors, other writers, and mass media, that you, the reader/watcher has the attention span of a post-coital fruit-fly.  You’re brain dead, baby, and only the most outrageous stimulus like more inventive sex or imminent death is going to revive your attention.

Authors can’t even describe their books as books.  Authors have to snag an agent or editor with a high concept.  Think high concept is fancy?  Literary?  Complicated?  Hell, no.  It’s all about Hollywood–the only topic most Americans seem able to relate to anymore.  These are high concept book pitches:

“My book is Sex in the City meets Halloween 84.”

“It’s Terminator meets Harry Met Sally.”

“The Little Mermaid combined with Queen of the Damned!”

Basically, throw together a wildly popular show or movie with something weird.  Because the public wants the same but different.  Unique but recognizable.  Heavens, we can’t present you with something brand spanking new!  We’d have to work to sell it because there would be no trite one-liner to throw at you that you’d understand.

(Steve Kaire asserts that the high concept pitch has been misunderstood for decades, and it is not about using movies.  However, if we’ve gotten it wrong for decades I doubt we’re going to change now.  And he still says that the material should be traditional (but original!) and have mass market appeal.  *Sigh*  I am so screwed.)

So do we have the attention span of fruit flys?  Will we no longer be able to watch movies longer than a YouTube flick?  Will books disappear because they’re too long?  Does only sex and death catch people’s interest these days?  Do you want sexy armpits?

P.S.  You might think I’ve got a serious case of sour grapes, but actually I’m a hypocrite (which is probably worse).  I’ve thrown my own one-liners (which typically involve crudity, dead bodies and one psychotic break) at agents and editors and been asked for a full manuscript every time.  My problem is I’m too scaredy-cat to let the books leave my sweaty little hands–maybe I need to put some Secret on my palms.