What We Are Dealing With — 2025

Writers today face a narrative landscape that no longer resembles the one our inherited forms were built for. The rhythms of reading, the economics of publishing, and the cognitive habits of audiences have all shifted. Fiction is still needed, but the conditions under which people encounter it have transformed beyond recognition.

The contemporary reader lives in a field of constant stimulus. Attention is fragmented by design—divided across notifications, feeds, screens, and pressures that demand immediate engagement. This does not mean readers have lost intelligence or appetite; it means their cognitive environment is different. Long, preparatory exposition now feels like friction. Stories must begin inside a moment, not ramp toward one.

This shift has reshaped the internal architecture of narrative. Chapters have collapsed from five thousand words to one thousand; scenes break into vignettes; white space becomes structural punctuation. Meaning emerges from accumulation rather than explanation. Readers prefer to infer rather than be told: subtext has replaced context as the primary carrier of information. Gesture, tone, rhythm, and omission do more work than descriptive paragraphs ever did.

As a result, fiction has become more kinetic. Not faster in the simplistic sense, but more dynamically paced—moving through emotional beats, perceptual fragments, and micro-turns that sustain attention without sacrificing depth. The modern reader does not want stories to hurry; they want stories that move.

The publishing system reinforces this shift, though not intentionally. Large-scale publishing rewards predictability, not discovery. Success is measured through sales projections, comp-title logic, and risk-management metrics. The result is a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which familiar structures survive, and unfamiliar ones never reach a reader. The ecosystem that once nurtured artistic risk is now structurally unable to do so.

At the same time, automated language models can now produce competent, grammatically sound prose on demand. They excel at what is explicit, expository, and conventional. This pushes human fiction toward what machines cannot convincingly imitate: specificity, subtext, negative space, emotional contradiction, sensory cognition, non-linear structure, and the small, precise details that arise only from lived experience.

Culturally, we have moved beyond the stable confidence of modernism, the ironic detachment of postmodernism, and into the oscillatory, sincerity–irony blend of metamodernism. Readers inhabit this oscillation naturally; they expect fiction to reflect it. Rigid tonal consistency now feels artificial. Emotional complexity delivered through movement feels true.

Meanwhile, institutions no longer anchor the field as they once did. Publishers optimize for risk reduction rather than innovation. Retailers such as Amazon function as marketplaces rather than discovery engines. Creative industries mirror the shift seen in music, where many independent artists have reconsidered their reliance on platforms like Spotify , seeking more direct relationships with audiences. Literature is moving along the same arc.

All of this creates a landscape in which older frameworks—three-act structures, extended exposition, leisurely chapters, omniscient explanation—are increasingly mismatched to lived experience. They still work, but they no longer lead. The field has quietly reorganized itself around immersion, velocity, subtext, modularity, participation, and ambivalent emotional charge.

This is the world writers inherit in 2025: a world where attention is scarce, meaning is distributed, institutions have lost authority, and machines can reproduce any form that relies on surface imitation. The task now is not to lament these conditions, but to understand them clearly.

We are dealing with a new cognitive era, a new technological substrate, a new emotional palette, and a new set of narrative expectations. Our forms must evolve to meet them.