The Vestigial Tale

Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter. Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn't think he's a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn't quite work on a computer screen.

"You're on the Web and the Internet all day, and you got your trigger finger on that Scroll Down button. And you're looking to move material across the screen. Move-and-skim is the mood you're in."

And that's no way to read a story.

"A story cur…