One liners, and the perils of social media

We Turkish are little specks, worker bees, in the hive of the world that is run by the Queen Bee, America. We grow up comparing and finding ways to be even 10 or 11. You grow up being number one.

Adalet in What Survives

One liners, two liners, what do they want from me? I do not write thrillers. I do not write action. I am quite content in the genre of literary and sometimes historical fiction. I am a writer who writes because it is simply what I do. I love to put ideas on the page, and to express them through my characters.

I am a dinosaur, burned out on the pressures of social media. I would have liked to have lived in the time of paper and pen only, even if making corrections and revisions would have been so much more tiresome. Oh yes, it is wonderful to move a sentence or a paragraph from here to there, to insert or remove whole chapters with the touch of a few fingers, to push a key and change a word throughout the entire text. I do confess to relishing and utilizing these technical capacities with delight. But along with these indisputable advantages, the digital age has a worrisome downside. We seem to have lost sight of the art of the long form. Everything must conform to the rapid attention span of a minute—or perhaps only a few seconds. Has everyone developed a case of ADHD?

I am asked for quotations from my novels to post online. Fine. I can do this. I find some. No, no. They are too long. Forget if cutting them makes them have no meaning, or that my thinking and writing process does not happen in Twitter and Instagram blurts. Perhaps I could create lines that I could disperse in my literary fiction, like spice, a few fingers of cumin, a tap of coriander, here and there. “The shadow moved behind her dresser, and her blood ran cold.” Too cliché? “The knife pressed hard against her ribs. His elbow jamming into her throat prevented her from crying out. She thought this might be the end.” Too long again? Let’s cut “She thought this might be the end.” Ah well, still too cliché. Oh, these lines have nothing at all to do with anything and actually do not appear in my novels. What does it matter? Will anyone who reads these quotations ever read the novels? I must say I have my doubts.

I am told that this is how people choose their reading material these days. If so, I probably have little hope of ever being read, even if I do try my very best to comply with the instructions I am given. I wonder how Charles Dickens would have fared in this climate. Actually, he probably would have done much better than I. He certainly was a much superior writer, and so I can imagine he would have found a way. And if I examine his opus, I can guess that I would find plenty of one liners. And so I tell myself, stop complaining and go back to the drawing board. This is 2022. And I am confident there is a lot I would not like about 1800s England.