Don’t bother reading this. No, seriously. Just turn the page and move on. Admit it. You don’t have the patience for 700 words. And I don’t blame you. You’re in advertising.

Seriously. Nothing is fast enough anymore. Nothing is short enough. Everything is too long. Too slow. Too something.

You get in to see a producer and you’ve got three minutes to pitch your two-hour screenplay. If you’re lucky. Not all that long ago, an elevator speech was a commencement address by the CEO of Otis.

Psychologists tell us that by the age of seven, our attention span has already shrunk to the size of a gnat brain. This is a problem. Especially if you’re an advertising creative.

At least the screenwriter gets two, three, possibly even five minutes to pitch his movie. But you and I, we’ve got maybe three seconds to get our hooks into somebody’s very resistant and not exactly advertising-friendly brain.

We don’t even have patience with each other for crying out loud. Ever seen what goes on at awards shows when it’s time to judge radio? If the first few seconds of a spot don’t immediately have you laughing hysterically, someone on the panel is going to say “Fast forward.” You know. As in to the next entry. Slow starts are not looked upon kindly by award-show juries.

Now, more than ever, if you’re going to get through to people, you better get them on board fast and I mean right now fast.

So lately I’ve been snooping around, trying to see how other creative professionals deal with the problem. And since I spend a lot of time in bookstores, well, I figured novelists might have something to say about all this.

Here’s the thing with books. They’re long. They have a lot of words inside. Most of the time, there are no pictures. Books are what they are. They take time to get through. Even for Evelyn Wood. If you buy a novel, you know this.

But in truth, a lot of people, and I’m one of them, are just as impatient with novelists as they are with advertising creative teams. And that means if you don’t suck me in with that first line, that first picture you plant in my mind, you’re not going to suck me in at all.

Seattle librarian, Nancy Pearl, agrees. “I think when you read a good first line, it’s like falling in love with somebody. Your heart starts pounding. It opens up all the possibilities.”

Well, let’s take a look:

“Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else’s breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost nonexistent bumps, but huge pendulous, full ones.” —Barbara Hodgson, The Sensualist

“Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me.” —Woody Allen, Without Feathers

“If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.” —Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.” —Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Not that getting out of the blocks in a hurry hasn’t always been important in advertising. A brilliant concept, if it’s anything, is a fast concept. Read the damn ad if you want. Doesn’t matter. In a heartbeat, a fast concept drives its hook into your cerebrum and that’s that.

The problem now is that the heartbeat has become something closer to that of a hummingbird on amphetamines than a person.

I remember trying to justify an edgy concept to a nervous client by telling him about all the thousands of messages that people get bombarded with every day. And it was true. But now, it’s really true.

Those messages we used to talk about? We were talking about conventional media. The usual suspects. TV. Radio. Newspaper. Movies. Magazines. And, of course, other advertisers.

Layer onto that videogames, Web content, blogs, MP3, podcasts and a thousand other media newbies all chewing away at our attention like a school of starved piranhas and it’s almost impossible to describe how fast an idea has to be now. Einstein told us that nothing can approach the speed of light. We better hope he was wrong.