Jolts Per Minute

At my Writer's Circle this week, one person said she had thought about buying all the best-selling novels to see what was working. However, when she looked at the rack of best-sellers in the grocery store (drug store, wherever she was), she said she was only interested in one, and that was a half-hearted interest at best. She said the others were all shallow, based on terror, and even that was not because of some well-developed evil character but because there was a psychopath threatening people for no logical, character-based reason other than his psychopathy.

I know there are other novels out there in whatever genre you want - novelists such as Jodi Piccoult, Sharyn McCrumb, CJ Cherryh, Elizabeth George, etc. - but it is disturbing that none of them are included in the mass-market 'best seller' displays in places where Joe and Jill Public might purchase a book.

That led to a discussion about why people might find that appealing. I think people have been conditioned by their exposure to television to need very strong jolts of adrenaline, such as would be caused by fear, sudden rage, or shock. I think TV producers (and other media too) probably have a way to measure 'jolts per minute', the number of rushes a watcher/listener/reader experiences. Is that what has led to the proliferation of action-oriented, scary plots with little if any real character development?

That discussion morphed into how even positive things like Sesame Street cause people to have very short attention spans. They expect something new and exciting every few minutes, as they have been conditioned that that is what will happen. Most older teachers who started teaching before the Sesame Street generation reached school will tell you that there has been a drastic change. Now students expect teachers to be entertainers, with something new, different, and exciting every few minutes. -But there is no off switch or channel-changer, at least no external one, but that doesn't stop students from using their internal one to turn the teacher off or switch channels to think about something else that is superficially more interesting.

Does that apply to writing too, that readers expect something new and exciting every few paragraphs, since they have been conditioned to believe that is what to expect?