Many of us don’t have “time” to read. That’s a lie.
According to the Solution Research Group,
“… Right now, the average American, 12 and over, spends 6.1 hours per day with video-based entertainment.” (Check out the article at http://www.i4u.com/article18085.html).
It also claims that in the future, this number will equal our sleeping time. I think they meant the time that people should sleep, because right now, we are sleeping less anyway. Is watching videos more important than sleep? Think about it!
This post isn’t about “reading awareness” or the “downward spiral of our society.” I understand this evolution: I’m a clear example of this. I’m a writer, and writers are supposed to read. The last book I tried to read, I dropped after twenty pages, and the book before that was a school assignment. My excuse to sit down and watch an episode of Lost is that it’s teaching me “plot techniques.” I know this habit isn’t making the quality of my writing any better and I know that I should be ashamed. But I don’t write to write beautiful prose, I write because I have stories to tell. And it just so happens that the way of communicating stories is changing. Say, I wrote a novel and it wasn’t half bad. It gets published. How many people would read it? Probably my friends, my family, and the few remaining believers in the written word. The number is just not enough. Hey, I’m no JK Rowling. I don’t want to be. It's just that my target audience can’t understand my language because it sits watching TV, YouTube, or listening to its iPod. My dilemma is that I’m not a producer, YouTube blogger, or singer. How am I supposed to adapt to today’s society? Because I want my voice to be heard, no matter the medium.
I’m willing to explore all mediums of communication: I paint, draw, [try to] play guitar, write novels, write scripts, write rants, write journals, make visual journals… but in the end, I’m still searching and waiting for the right one. It may not even be discovered yet. Taking myself as an example again, I listen to my iPod more hours a day than I watch TV (1-2 hours a day, the ads annoy me). But I never bought an audio book for it, so I’m not sure that anyone else would consider that either. Music is complicated. It needs a band, a singer (because I’m one of the few people that appreciates instrumental music), and songs that I would write would be too personal. In a novel, an alternate universe is created and the writer is shielded from becoming too personal. But TV and movies are not personal enough. TV shows have multiple writers and while maybe my main points would be kept intact (if I hypothetically get a chance to create one), the rest would be up to the other writers. Movies are a one time thing and two hours or less with the viewer isn’t something I’m looking for. Whatever it is that I create, I want to be watched, read, or listened to over and over, with great interest. But isn’t that what all artists want?
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