It feels like a cliche to say that we live busier and more time-pressured lives. What is clearer is that the way we spend our time has changed over time, impacted by social, economic and cultural factors. The notion of “free time” and how we mind personally and collectively spend it is very different in different places around the world.
Our appetite for stories is more universal and it has been a cornerstone of cross-cultural exchange. But formats have risen and waned over the course of time. Our oral storytelling tradition is as ancient as recorded history. Written formats have developed from the population-level messages of religious texts to works tailored to our specific tastes and preferences.
The long form of works such as the Icelandic sagas are mirrored in the lengthy episodic story arcs of television soap operas or the current cultural dominance of superhero multiverses in our cinemas.
And while we revel in deeper relationships with characters and situations, we often come back to the basic unit of storytelling: the story told from beginning to end in one sitting.
Its literary expression – the short story – had somewhat fallen out of favour as a viable format for many publishers. But it has seen a significant renaissance as a darling of digital publishing, keen to deliver bite-sized stories to busy readers on the go.
Literary journals have long been a platform for new writers, providing the bridge from emerging to published, often showcasing the early works of writers who go on to more acclaimed careers. They have largely moved to online platforms and are now looking at more innovative ways to present their stories.
Alongside this, boutique publishing houses have emerged looking at personalised audiobooks, in one form or another. The short story has again attracted focus, both for its digestible size and the ability to be priced for sale at a very affordable cost. We see this in the academic world with a more recent emphasis on the mid-length monographs with Cambridge Elements, Palgrave Macmillan, and Bristol University Press’s Shorts, among others.
As our attention spans become shorter, readers’ mindsets are beginning to change about how they feel about shorter works such as novella, short stories, and graphic novels. Some of this impetus is being led by younger readers who value the short dipping into different stories that fit within their busy lives in the attention economy – where everything is vying for our attention at all times (from books, to tv, film, social platforms, different sized screens, etc.).
Because reading is both a solitary and social act, and readers are now pressed for time with their attention being pulled in every direction, we engage with stories in different ways across platforms. One example of this is the rise of readers of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, a novella from the 19th century that grew in popularity on social media in 2024. Some of the popularity of this is linked to how short it is, just over 80 pages long. While that is not the only reason for its popularity, it does speak to the attention span of modern readers. We want to read privately, in our own spaces on our own times, but we also read socially, where reading is a performance of ‘reading and being read’ online. All of this makes it harder to balance the time we have, and this is where different ways of reading come into their own.
When people are so busy, they often struggle to balance their free time in terms of ensuring moments for rest and recharging alongside time for connection and socialising. Personalised audiobooks – where audiobooks are created and shared in the voices of your community and loved ones – offer an interesting balance between this craved connection and a sense of pure relaxation, especially in the form of short stories.
When evidence shows that as little as a 12 minute conversation with a friend can have a dramatically positive impact on people’s mental wellbeing, it’s interesting to ponder whether the power of a story captured in a loved one’s voice can have a similar therapeutic impact.
What seems more certain is that the short story has reestablished itself in the collective imagination of the reading public. And its adaptability to modern tastes should serve it well. Almost everyone who writes, starts with shorter formats. Short stories are something we’ve all had to write as part of our education. So while the old adage that “everyone has a book in them” might not quite come to pass these days, everyone has a story to tell, making the short story format as universally relatable as one could imagine.