As a writer, I am vying for your attention. I’m working against seemingly unbeatable distractions. And it’s not just me, every writer in this day and age deals with this problem.

In this world of endless soundbites, of a 140-character limit to ideas, where distraction is literally at every corner, and instagramming and tweeting and facebooking are all immediate and constant distractions to anyone with a smartphone (so, basically, anyone), writers like myself are posed with a huge problem: how do we acquire a readership? Which means, how do we effectively communicate with people? And more specifically, how do we find people who are willing to listen?

It used to be that writing was the leading form of communication, and, believe it or not, was the most popular form of entertainment. When there were no televisions or YouTube videos or social media or any form of instantly gratifying distraction, the choicest object of entertainment was the novel. In that time novels tended to be longer, more complicated, capable of withstanding multiple readings, partly designed for long winters within nowhere, when at night you would sit and read until the candles went out. And, yes, that is probably an over-romantacized picture of life before the digital age, but before people were liberated by self-working technology, they were wonderfully constrained to deep thought. So many writers flourished—Charles Dickens, for example, was probably the first living celebrity. As copies of his conclusion to The Old Curiosity Shop landed in America, masses of readers swarmed the docks and shouted to sailors, “Is Little Nell alive?” And though this is familiar American behavior (as J.R.R. Tolkien once said, “Americans tend to be easily kindled”), it is odd to connect such behavior with books. Books demand complete attention—after all, you’re either reading or not reading, you can’t do both—and full attention for a long period of time is no common thing these days.

I remember one time I was talking to a friend of mine about his new smartphone, and though he was excited about its generally improved speed, there was one quirk that really annoyed him. Whenever he went to the home screen, I suppose because of new software, it took a full extra half-second before he could swipe to other apps. His annoyance with this really caused me to think.

This isn’t such a strange example, you know. After all, we consider internet to be slow if a website take more than ten seconds to load, and if you’ve ever watched television you’ve probably noticed that scenes rarely last longer than two seconds, they’re constantly changing to keep up with their ever-distracted viewers. And I as a writer have to wonder how I could possibly compete with those fast-paced distractions, or how I could ever hold the attention of a potential reader for longer than a couple minutes.

Now the point of all this is certainly not a plea for readers to support writers like me with their readership, it is rather a wake-up call to anyone caught up in these distractions. Now I don’t want anyone to stop watching television or videos or using the internet completely, nor do I want distractions like Instagram and Twitter and Facebook to go away in full—distraction has its time and place—but I can promise you as a writer and reader that the written word is the richest and most rewarding form of entertainment or communication or escape.

The solution to the writers dilemma lies within our potential readers: they themselves must make the change, if change is to be made. They must realize that the written word is valuable, and must decide to set aside the distractions and spend a few hours elsewhere.

The message here is not to “slow down and take it easy.” But we should realize that in such a fast-paced world sometimes we need to stop and think. Basically I’m telling you to consider consideration. The things that affect you and make your life enjoyable are hardly ever such temporal things as distractions. I bet you don’t remember the last TV show episode you watched, or much about it, because all it contributed was a few minutes of distraction from your life. I promise you, the things that require concentration and a little work are far more enriching than mere distraction. And if you feel satisfied with these mere distractions I urge you to reconsider, because if you spend your life in distraction from the real world, your life will be an empty one.