Advice for Writers: Combatting Boredom

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is somewhat cryptic, at least how it's noted on our calendar: Long books - how not to get bored.

It's not entirely clear to me who's attempting to avoid boredom here. The writer? The reader? 

Hopefully not the reader! Most of us readers who love to read long books are totally in it for the long, for the full immersion into another world, living other lives. I suspect the principles for writing a long book that won't bore readers are the same as writing *anything* at all. We never want to bore readers.

So, I'm going to assume we're asking about getting bored writing long books. How to avoid that?

You can't.

Sorry, but... sometimes writing is boring. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's agonizing. Writing novels, especially very long ones, requires a particular skill set of paying attention to, and working incrementally on, a work that takes a very long time to complete. 

The whole point is not to try to avoid boredom with the process. The point is to revise your expectations. 

Writing is work. This is why there are so many people who SAY they always wanted to write a novel and such a vanishingly smaller percentage who have. An even smaller percentage of that subset ever write more than six books. It's hard work and there's a reason we distinguish work from fun. Writing may be occasionally fun, but it's always work.

What's important to keep in mind is that the experience of writing is not the experience of reading. Don't conflate the two. One of my least favorite pieces of "writing advice" is the saw that "if the writer is bored writing it, the reader will be bored reading it."

NOT TRUE.

Writing takes vastly longer than reading. Every one of us who has spent months writing a book that releases at midnight and then wakes up to comments from readers who read it overnight understands this truth viscerally. Writing a novel, especially a long novel, requires patience and attention over a long span of time. 

So: don't worry about finding ways to not get bored while writing long works. Accept that boredom is part of the process. It's part of the price we pay. 

 

You're not bored, I'm bored

Y'all. Authors are like seagulls. We like to bite off more than we can chew. Most of the time, we're scrappy enough that getting what we wants excites us and we scream after it with abandon. When we're like this, we're writing great guns and while we might not be at our most coherent, we're probably not boring ourselves or anyone else.

Sometimes, though, we're wounded seagulls limping, pathetic, and begging for scrapes. Getting words may or may not be akin to squeezing blood from a stone, but I guarantee we're bored and burned out and neurotic and second guessing every last thing we say, think, or do. We're bored. Bored. Bored. BORED.

But. Because neither seagulls nor authors are entirely rational animals, our boredom has no bearing on whether readers will be bored. It's because while maybe we aren't feeling a story, we're still authors. We still know how to do the job. We know how to structure a story. Also, it's because it's super likely that it isn't the story we're bored with.

We're bored with ourselves. We're bored with our neuroses, and we know on a deep, subconscious level that something may be wrong with the story. That's what kicks us in the self-confidence. We'll sit and struggle with the problems in our stories, trying to choke them down and keep making progress. Remember. We're pathetic, emotionally stunted, injured seabirds here. We're already a neurotic mess - especially about our writing. Problems arise when someone comes along with the well-meaning advice that when we're bored our readers will be bored. 

It's a fast-track to a complete freeze. Frozen seagulls poop (a lot) in terror. Frozen authors -- yeah, who knows? I'm afraid to look. I only know that when I'm bored with a story, it's because my neuroses are lying to me. Yes, there might also be something wrong with the story. But I cannot let that stop me. I need to keep writing. That's how I finally figure out where and how the book is broken. During it, though, I'm already second guessing myself into oblivion. Being told I'm probably boring my readers just buggers up the works even more.

So. "If you're bored, your readers will be too." It's pithy. It might be cute on a tee shirt. But the quote needs to be yeeted into deep space cause that cute little one liner t'ain't necessarily so. 

My job as a writer is to let a story be what it needs to be. Initially. If your draft is boring, who cares?? No one sees that. It's yours. Besides, there's an excellent chance that your assessment is dead wrong and you're just sick of the story. Either way, the proof and power is in the rewrite.And that's where your power lies. Mine, too. 

I'm a hopeless, pathetic seagull when I draft. I'm a seagull with a switchblade when I edit, though, so boring better watch out. I'm coming to carve up a manuscript.

When the Adage Doesn't Apply

"If you're bored writing it, the reader will be bored reading it."

~blink, blink~
~rolls on the floor laughing and groaning~

Here's the thing about writing advice (okay, okay there are many "things" but this ONE thing is...), it spans the humungous pool of all types of writing. From journalism, to academia, to tech writing, to memoir, to screenplays, to speculative fiction, to romance, and all the niches and crevices therein.

Methinks the boredom adage, along with its cousin "Write What You Know," is bleed over from the non-fic world. There's a lot of advice from that sector that simply doesn't apply to fiction. Think about it. Unless we're being paid heaps to ghostwrite something tedious, why, oh why would we waste our time writing something boring? Why, when most of us have hundreds of story ideas clamoring for the sustained attention required to write a novel, would we punish ourselves with the dull and uninteresting?

That's not to say that every word, scene, chapter, and revision is on-the-edge-of-our-seats exciting. It is work. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to get through a scene, but it's not because of boredom. We've got a long list of better excuses for those moments. 

Cover Reveal, the RITA® Awards and Boring the Reader

Cover Reveal!!

So, my novella, THE DRAGONS OF SUMMER, which first appeared (and still appears) in the SEASONS OF SORCERY anthology is a finalist in the RITA® Awards! The amazing Ravven had only just completed the cover - and we'd been planning to release the standalone story in April - but we seized the opportunity to put that shiny silver Finalist medallion on the cover and we'll be releasing the stand alone story any minute now. I'm even doing a print edition for you paper purists. 

Since our topic at the SFF Seven this week is the open "On My Mind," I feel like I should say, also, that I share the concern about the RITA Awards recognizing diverse authors. It's a difficult place to be - wanting to celebrate that this story, which I truly love, received this wonderful recognition - while being aware that the finalists include only four authors of color (AOC) and no Black authors.

There is, without a doubt, bias in judging. Reading is always subjective to begin with. Worse, within RWA and the judging pool, there are judges with conscious and unconscious biases. Racism and homophobia absolutely come into play. From personal experience, I can confirm that THE EDGE OF THE BLADE, my book with a dark-skinned pansexual heroine, received a 4/10 from one RITA judge - the lowest score any of my books has ever received from any judge in this contest. This book is the sequel to THE PAGES OF THE MIND, which finaled for an won a RITA that year. I seriously doubt the judge who gave the book a 4 found that it was badly written compared to the others. Sure, that lowest score got dropped. (Five judges read and rank each book; the highest and lowest scores are dropped.) But if two judges impose that kind of bias, that can severely sabotage a book's overall score. Even the "I just didn't connect with the characters" syndrome can lower a book's score by a critical 1 point.

So, what do we do? A lot of people are working on this. I absolutely support the RWA Board's continued efforts to rectify this problem. The current Board of Directors is a diverse - color, gender, and orientation - and committed group who absolutely want to solve this problem. They have been working on it. Unfortunately, correcting this kind of systemic bias occur on the societal equivalent of geologic time. There are a lot of moving parts and ingrained attitudes that need correcting. I'm hearing a lot of "burn the RITAs to the ground" and even "burn RWA to the ground," and I don't agree with either solution. When you burn things to the ground you get a lot of scorched earth. I fully believe we can make this change - and the fire of all this passionate involvement can be rocket fuel rather than lighter fluid. 

On another note, because I promised a few people, I want to follow up on my post from last week on what I think is bad writing advice: "If you're bored, the reader will be, too." James said the following day that he disagreed, but he also didn't understand my point. He said he hates being bored as a reader. Well, of course! I never said it was okay to bore the reader.

What I said was that it's not valid to conflate the author experience with the reader one. 

The reverse situation proves this point: that what the author finds fascinating is not necessarily what will fascinate the reader. Witness the common mistake where a writer does a bunch of in-depth research - and then can't resist throwing it all into the book. This is such a pervasive phenomenon that "the overly researched historical novel" has been a category in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for an atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel. 

That's part of why I think "If the writer is bored, the reader will be, too" is such bad advice, because it implies that as long as the writer is having fun, so will the reader.

And this is SO NOT TRUE.

Of course no writer wants to bore the reader - and a great deal of craft goes into ensuring this doesn't happen. How can an author know? Experience, refining the craft, listening to valid feedback. (The valid part is really important - you have to learn who to take seriously.) But a writer cannot assume that their subjective writing experience will translate to the reader's experience. 

Learning to communicate our stories so the reader receives something of what we hope to tell is a lifelong effort in refining voice and craft. 

Really, but No

Happy St. Patrick's Day! David and I are both from Irish families. You can see it in those smiling eyes, yes?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "I don't think so. Name a piece of writing advice you do not agree with and explain why."

Some of you might be able to guess which bit of advice I'm going to say. It's been on my mind lately and I've mentioned it often enough that I already have a tag/label for it.

It's this one: "If You're Bored Your Readers Will Be Too."

Really, but no.

When I've posted about this before (Looks like I did nearly a year ago, so that's not TOO recent), people have argued with me. "People" meaning other writers. They contend that they must FEEL the feels in the story or their readers won't. I can't argue with anyone else's process - the First Rule of Being a Writer is Own Your Process - but I don't think the writing experience should be conflated with the reading experience.

The two are VERY different. In the most basic sense, reading is faster than writing. I suspect if we did a cage match of the slowest reader with the fastest writer, the reader would still prevail. Also, absorbing a story is different than creating one. Finally, "boredom" is a relative term.

I'm going to focus on this last one.

Anyone who's been a parent, or spent any time around kids, is familiar with the "I'm so boorrrrred" complaint. It's usually ill-timed, delivered when the adult is working hard on some necessary but unexciting task of their own.

Merriam-Webster - the dictionary with the most politically on-point Twitter feed of its ilk - defines boredom as the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest. That "weary and restless" part is what makes the complaint from kids irritating. They're expressing a restlessness of youth, and the weariness is mostly emotional. The usual temptation is suggest various household chores to absorb their energy, but we all know that doesn't answer the complaint.

What they need to do is solve their own problem, and find something to invest their energy into.

I argue that "boredom" in writing is much the same. When we feel weary and restless while writing, it's a sign that we're working on a problem that needs our attention and energy. When a reader is bored, it's a sign that we've failed to engage their interest.

See how these are two totally different problems?

That's why I think it's terrible advice. If the writer is bored, they need to work through it, knowing that feeling restless with the slow pace of writing is part of the process. If you're worried about the readers being bored, then you need to look at other factors, like plot, pacing, emotions, investment in the characters, and so forth.

Éirinn go Brách!