A Writer's Guide to Boredom

If the book you are reading begins to displease you, you can skip ahead, hopeful of finding a more engaging foothold, or you can set the book aside, never to return.  If a film you are watching in a theater begins to turn your sensitivities as though you had eaten the wrong taco at the wrong restaurant, you can get up and leave.  Similarly you can switch the channel on your TV, seek another CD for a more enjoyable musical experience, bail out of a play or lecture at an intermission, toss a magazine aside or even not renew your subscription when renewal time comes about.  You could, if you were a student, drop a class when it became apparent to you that the instructor was monotonous in presentation or brought a particular bias to the presentation that caused you to wait for another instructor to act as your guide.

These ventures all have the common thread of an escape hatch.  You are escaping from disinterest or lack of engagement.  You are escaping from boredom.  By extrapolation, boredom is the product of circumstances that force you to remain in the vicinity of an exposure to dramatic, statistical, or artistic material that by its very nature causes you to wish to avoid.  Boredom is being trapped in a situation where you are being presented with some form of information you wish no exposure to.

The presentiment of boredom arrives with an ominous cadence of inner responses being triggered in you, causing you to estimate a level at which your tolerance will erupt.  Boredom is the realization that you must endure even more information you do not wish to inflict on your sensory receptors.  If, you tell yourself, I have to read one more page, hear one more sentence, endure one more scene, I will do something that allows me to expel the pent-up resentment that has been building within me.

You would think that a writer would use the process of writing to construct dramatic situations that cause the exact opposite of boredom, which is to say empathy, involvement, concern, care.  You would think that one of the writer's earliest motivations was to create emotional and imaginary landscapes he or she was unable to find anywhere else and thus satisfy an inner craving for transportation away from the drabness of the quotidian and into the excited tingle of another world.  You would think so and in an approach that has still not entirely given way to skepticism or cynicism, you approach new books with the belief that they are tickets to another universe, a fraught universe, a universe that causes your skin to tingle, your mind to roar with anticipation, your feelings to perform arpeggios and glissandos on your spinal column.

But we are of course not all tuned to the same responsive key nor do we have interests shared by great swaths of humankind.  Your interests can and do bore others, which has made you aware of the great tool of voicing by which it becomes possible to interest individuals with the information you are eager to provide rather than bore or distract them.

Spending time in a condition of boredom is a humbling experience for a writer, one possibly lost in the sheer exuberance of escaping the atmosphere of boredom.  Your own biggest fear is that of boring those you wish for some reason or complexity or reasons to interest.   The sense that you are boring such an individual is worse than a hundred rejection slips because you have become alert to the multiplicity of reasons for the rejection slip that have nothing to do with boredom.

It becomes so easy to generalize:  The key to effective storytelling is to begin with an irresistible sentence, followed by another, and then another, after which you will have built sufficient momentum to cause whoever shall read them to urge you to continue.  At this point you will have experienced the seeming magic of power by putting into play the great dramatic maxim, "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go."  Yeah, right.

Well, actually, it is right.  Withhold.  When you present the reader with more information and/or philosophy than the reader wants to know, you have brought them right back to the point at hand, which is to say you have put them not in care's way or harm's way but in the way of boredom.

Answers

There are matters in life--questions, really--that are all but unanswerable; some wiggle room is left for a tentative "Well..." trailing off into the abyss of the unknown, the unreckoned, the inconceivable. In story, someone has to come along with the observation "That won't do. There's got to be an answer," transforming story immediately from the quotidian to the tense, dramatic, zip file of fiction.

Today, as you sat in one of your favorite corners of your favorite coffee shop, trying to get some traction with a book review that did not want to grant traction, you overheard such an unanswerable question, rising out of conversation like pure ectoplasm in a seance. "People on the other side," a sincere-to-the-point-of-matter-of-factness said, "help us over." The same voice quickly abused you that the Other Side could mean anything other than The Spirit World. Before this individual's companion could frame the question stretching its elephantine trunk, the speaker said, "You'll have to trust me on this," thus removing from the table any hint of rationality. Those of us who are big on faith have no problem with the Other Side, with God, possibly even with the Republican party; these things are articles we believe in because of some internal rumble that could be anything on a spectrum that has its alpha at acid reflux and its omega at God. I know there is God because I have this feeling.

Story doesn't so much go after those who have faith or, indeed, believe there is a God in whom they most surely believe as it is, to borrow freely from Biblical lore, the scepticism of the Doubting Thomas, wanting proof. The demand for the tangible propels the story to some conclusion, either one that demonstrates, yes; there is a God, or the no, in thunder of the refusal to accept anything so fanciful.

I can't answer that question is an option in a political debate, a science lab, or an on-line dating program. Story will have none of it; unless there is a force powerful enough to drive someone to discover the answer, the good stuff in story would never be told. We would rather have the wrong answer in story than no answer at all. Reality is another matter. We even agree through manipulation of CW, conventional wisdom, how wise it is to admit the unanswerability of certain questions involving probability or lack of sufficient data.

That word, data, immediately conjures up the traces of sound argument and a logical pursuit to get at the bottom of things. We want data rather than information in story because data, by its very sound and the elitist way it is distinguished from stuff or information, transcends the two worlds of the made-up and the reality going on at a given moment in a given place. A city may be located a mile above sea level and we will accept that as a relative fact, but for the mile above sea level to be in some precipitous mountain range where most access is a chore, the information changes it to the point where we are gasping for air even as we read.

Because of our human wiring, which is in some major way given to curiosity and eavesdropping, we want answers, and we will continue reading until someone gives them to us.

Benefits

What do you get from writing?

Assuming you do get something or, indeed, some things, what do you get that you couldn't get from reading or, for that matter, an idiosyncratic combination of reading and listening to music?

These two activities supply a major source of pleasure, excitement, information, challenge, and companionship, delivered as it were, right at your doorstep. There are any number of splendid men and women who tell stories or ply theses to your satisfaction, allowing you at once an overwhelming sense of knowing you could never catch up with all the reading you want to do, while at the same time being aware of the riches of discovery that await you. There are also untapped resources among the musical composers you already know, triggering the feelings and memories within you to seek time listening or, indeed, recreating them in your mind from memory.

This leaves you with at least one answer to the first question, which is that you get satisfaction from your desire to perform. Although by your account you have written some simply dreadful things, they were not sufficiently dreadful enough nor was there ever a response to you work suggesting they were so dreadful that you found it too painful to even consider much less wish to perform again. Performance is at its best high adventure, lifting you in unanticipated ways, holding you to account in yet other ways. While you are in the act, there is a constant reminder of the time when you had several blue tick hounds and opening a door meant they all scrambled to get out. There are emotions and memories of a piece with the hounds, wanting to get out, to follow their instincts, which is to say their large scent receptors.

Writing then gives you a sense of the scramble within you and, alas, sometimes of the lack of scramble, but this has its cure, which is putting into the equation that excitement, that stimulus that will draw you out of the shell of regular self and into the clamor of the writing self.

Your answers to that opening question become nuanced, multifarious; you get answers to questions you did not know you had, connecting tissue between two or more events you had previously thought to be discreet. You even get memories yanked from your past that were as coins slipped from your pocket into the recesses of a sofa.

Reading and listening to music, pleasing as they are, informative and reflexive as they are, become passive in comparison to writing. You are then performing, doing what you read of others doing or hearing or seeing. You are doing so in the risk of not being up to the standards of the things you listen to and read, you are doing so at the risk of sporting a monumental hubris, thinking, for instance, that you could walk down the country lane with the likes of Beethoven or Ravel or Dvorak and whistle with them. But ah, they are splendid friends; they do not need you and thus they challenge you to keep up with them.

A Table for Two

The driving force in narrative is curiosity.
Reader and characters proceed to peer beyond what will happen, into the territory of what information will be revealed in the unfolding of an event.

Two individuals are having a conversation somewhere--or so the reader thinks at first blush.  Each of the two characters has come into the scene bearing the baggage of explosive previous encounters.  They have come to THIS place because it is neutral, with no associations for either of them.  They have brought with them the gifts of a resolve to be patient with one another, each purposeful in the intent to let the other finish thoughts, sentences, ideas.

We don't know the names, gender, ages, social rank of either and yet look at how much we already know about them.  The "Go-ahead" card is down on the table; each is determined to let the other go ahead and/or finish what is to be said.

We can begin to wrap other relevant data about the armatures of these two, data that will find its way with a snow-shoes-through-a-mine-field purpose and caution, learning more about each of the characters and feeling the tangible emotional climate as they proceed.

So long as we have been triggered toward suspicion, we can suspect they will once again escalate toward combustion because they have done so in the past.  WE may also feel the mounting tension because timing and pace have become important factors in the meeting.  

Though neither has an abundance of time, each is constrained by the be patient rule. Whatever the subject of conversation, we sense the control and deliberation being exercised to the point where it becomes a tangible tension.  

The subject may never be directly articulated, as with the conversation between the couple in the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants."  The subject at hand may also be--writer's choice--carefully spelled out to the point where the reader will wonder, What is it with these two? because there is a subtext shimmering there over the conversation like the ghost of a former lover.  

We may, of course, set off with a conclusion already in mind.  They are heading to combustion, perhaps to the point of not speaking again for some weeks or months to come--perhaps not ever again.  Having opted for this approach, we can set the conversation in motion with an agenda or agreed-upon result:  Did you bring the papers for me to sign?  

What a lovely, evocative line.  "Of course I brought the papers for you to sign.  That was the entire purpose of this meeting, wasn't it?"  What a lovely lagniappe to tack onto this simple sentence:  "What do you take me for?"  And now, the attitude-tinged response.  "Well."  Or, if you are the sort who prizes greater clarity:  "Well, I thought..."

The thing has evolved; we want to know.  Reader and writer, we want to know.  Let's start with the first thing we want to know:
"What's that supposed to mean?"

There is absolutely nothing unusual in this conversation, yet it carries agenda and implication crackling between the two characters much in the manner of the electricity between Richard and Anne in Richard III, Act One, Scene Two.

What will they do?  When and how will they do it?

We still know precious little about them.  Does it say anywhere that they are analogs of two trains, speeding toward one another on the same track?  So long as the conversation is on the table, a tension begins to grow until none of us, reader, writer, or characters can endure it.  And this is the point where we begin looking closely for the optimal point in the text to end the scene, a deed that may mean leaving out a line or an exchange that has become memorable with the texture of wit, but this is not about wit; it is about two unnamed individuals of indeterminate age, gender, and moral clarity, meeting to exchange dialogue.  

We barely know enough about either to determine who they are or what they want and what they might do to us.  They could be man and woman, woman and woman, man and man.  They could be former lovers, present-time lovers, parent and child.  The choice is entirely ours.  

We have set them loose to work their way across the whiteness of page, of computer screen, of the stage of the mind.  They are nameless but they are armed with two weapons that may pierce us to the quick, drama and dialogue.

On--not between--a rock and a hard place

Why do you read?  Why does anyone read?

To glean information, of course; to discover who won a race, a game, an election, a literary prize; to discover how differing persons felt when they were doing things you had always dreamed of doing but were somehow too timid to undertake or born in the wrong century or place or both; to see how individuals other than yourself coped with human conditions you coped with; to daydream, to wonder what it would be like, if only...

You read because it is habitual to the extent that if you did not read, you would suffer varying incarnations of withdrawal. You read your own journals and stories because they are metaphors for penciled height marks on some wall or door frame, whereby you measure who you once were against who you think yourself to be now, at this very moment.  You read to educate yourself in ways that will cause you to experience a greater understanding of what it means to be alive, and to come to terms with Reality the same way you come to terms with a difficult relative or difficult acquaintance, which is to say you consider options of disowning Reality or the difficult relative or acquaintance.  

You consider the options of that word that could never have come forth from the shadows had there been no Internet: unfriend.  You can say, Once upon a time, I was a great friend of Reality, but Reality has refused to share its toys and has never offered me so much as a bite of its peanut butter and jelly sandwich, therefore I abjure Reality and instead opt for Fantasy as my new BFF.  

You read because reading once provided you with the delightful notion that it was possible to earn one's living from writing things other persons might read, thus an early form of shamanism on your part because you had no idea what one had to go through in order to produce material others might wish to read; the entire process meant you sat somewhere, wrote, sent it somewhere, and the money--note the construction there:  the money, not royalties or advances or first N.A. rights, merely the money--came from somewhere else.

You read to remind you of differing views of the same experience, and of the men and women whose materials strike you as elegant, funny, plangent, clever, resourceful, an awareness that causes you to realize that more often than not the writers you most admire are those who cause you to be in a place you might not otherwise be, concerned for the fate of a man, woman, or child you were surprised to have had any care for.  

At one time in your reading, you might have described your favorite reading material as adventure, meaning to the then you that you expected to have some journey to a particular place, whereupon you would have an encounter from which you would emerge with some prize you would bring back to share with those about you, hello Joseph Campbell; you read to become a hero in metaphor if not in fact.  Now, as a result of having read and continuing to do so, you are able to look upon the reading you do as a ratifying of the writing you chose to embark upon, once again recognizing Joseph Campbell but not with the sense of wanting to regard yourself as heroic but rather as a way of getting you off to places and situations you might not otherwise visit, places where there is some scary potential for outcome or, scariest of all, lack of outcome.

Somewhere in the American Southwest, amid a number of truly ancient petroglyphs, is a huge boulder with the words Paso por aqui incised on its side, a thing to be read by the many others who have passed by here.  The incisions of the petroglyphs were more likely to be representations of animals, rodents, reptiles, birds, perhaps the occasional bolt of lightning; they were likely to have been put there by individuals who were stoned on some cactus or seed, recording their visions of said animals, rodents, reptiles, and birds who represented messages of some sort or another.  It is not much of a stretch to imagine some contemporary seeing said petroglyph and thinking, Ah, Fred must have had a conversation with a snake right about here, and was told to save water for the coming drought.  It is still possible to see the incision on the rock, but thanks to deconstruction, the text may have lost a bit in translation.

As writers, we are willing to have conversations with animals, rodents, reptiles, and birds.  As for lightning bolts, even Vladimir Nabokov was willing to essay a conversation, witness his two-word disposal of Lolita's mother's death, (picnic,Lightning).  We are willing to have conversations with individuals who are entirely bogus but whom we wrap event and sensation and experience as though we were wrapping the armature for an electric motor.  We are setting warnings and tagging and the written equivalent of arm waving to a teacher when we were kids and knew we had the right answer to a question.

In our itch and urge to demonstrate that we got some message from our journey, we want to write it down and be read, curiously unmindful of the great irony of duality, no one wants to hear advice from an elder; we want to create our own advice.  Thus we learn through reading techniques by which we are able to set forth our own prize of advice in ways others will indeed want to read; thus we learn that it is about them, our characters, and them, our putative readers.

Simple Solutions to Big Problems

newly wed housewife, the--a fitting trope for the insecure writer; an attitude in which the writer is overly concerned at the paucity of motivational and physical detail for dramatic action.

Think of the newly wed preparing her first meal for company, then try to superimpose the image on the vision of a writer wondering if the intent and details of a story are clear enough in definition. Likely result: a control-freak attitude toward description. The exact moment an activity or intent begins. A Vogue Magazine description of what the characters are wearing. A laundry list of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps even an instance or two or six of authorial intrusion.

None of these tactics are fatal; F. Scott Fitzgerald employs them with great regularity (Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby), the difference being he gives them a dramatic context that has meaning beyond mere description. These tactics give a better sense of the world into which Fitzgerald has invited us to eavesdrop. Look also at the way his dialogue and narrative work, moving you at a comfortable pace from action to action, weighing each scene down with the tang of such emotions as apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, despair, need.

There is no problem with over-describing each action between characters, each setting, each nuance of each exchange of dialogue. This approach helps articulate the inevitability and authenticity of a story. The problem comes with allowing the prompts and attributions to remain when there is sufficient activity and attitude to reflect the drama that is under way.

Hint: cast your narrative and scenes toward the goal of an emotional presence, using verbs chosen for their personality, hinting at implied meanings, picking adverbs with great deliberation, avoiding the temptation to double up on adjectives, eschewing simile and metaphor that distract from the work at hand rather than illustrate it.

Withhold

withhold--a narrative strategy for delaying the presentation of vital dramatic information; a dramatic device for creating tension if not outright suspense in a story by means of causing the reader to wonder about a detail, event, or meaning.

Readers are natural matchmakers; they will speculate on the potential embers of romantic attraction bursting into flames when characters exchange glances or respond edgily to one another, seeing sexual tension everywhere, whether intended by the writer or not. Readers will wonder and make outrageous assumptions. Let them. They will suspect the suspects in a mystery for reasons other than those intended by the writer. Let them.

Writers who read their work in classes or writers' groups will frequently be enjoined to bring the story to a screeching halt by injecting physical descriptions and details of attitudes and beliefs. This is done in the spirit of wanting to be helpful, in pointing out to the writer the need for details that humanize the characters. Trouble is, such details are irrelevant and actual albatrosses until the reader is made curious about them in the first place. The proof of the reading resides in the curiosity itching away at these literal minds who ask for details. Most habitual readers can and will continue reading a story without knowing what color a character's eyes are or what she is wearing. Particularly if the character is involved in some activity such as arguing or asserting her independence or difference of opinion.

Some accomplished writers never describe characters, wanting readers to supply their own vision; their use of description and/or explanation is limited, conveyed by indirection rather than description. Prolific writers often limit their descriptions of characters and of settings to elements that reveal qualities by implication. Denise Mina, for instance, is at greater pains to describe her protagonist Paddy Meehan's attempts at dietary precautions than she is to provide actual references to body configuration, and as a result, when Paddy overindulges, the reader feels a sympathy for her interior climate.

Nor are detailed reasons for a character's behavior likely to impart greater gravity or conviction to a that character's behavior. Often such descriptions are the first things that can be removed in the revision process.

Hint: Make them want it, which they will if it is not presented too soon.

Talking Heads

talking heads--two or more characters in a scene/setting, exchanging dialogue with only minimal accompanying gesture or inflection; characters seen by the reader as exchanging dramatic information which is little more than narrative encased in quotation marks; by implication, characters who fail to demonstrate significant dramatic force within a story.

Individuals converse in real life. Characters use dialogue and agenda as though each were a volleyball being batted back and forth over a net. "Characters" in an oratorio sit in some pew-like arrangement, singing while reading directly from a musical score. Characters in an opera exchange dialogue, sing, and move about on the stage, providing dramatic action while they sing.

Some writers use talking heads in the belief that they are showing rather than telling, indulging their characters in long exchanges of information framed by quotation marks, but giving no sense whatsoever of what the speaker is seeing, tasting, feeling, or any other drama-based activity. Such exchanges, because they are notably lacking in subtext, add a weight of consequence to the narrative that is often fatal, providing the reader with an excellent opportunity to set the book or story down without intention of return.

Get your characters into a reaction process with one or more of the other characters in a scene as quickly as possible. Avoid the temptation to have characters utter speeches or, for that matter, anything else. Dialogue is spoken, even shouted, perhaps sputtered. Imagine a cast of characters in a play or film, not using their body, certainly not their face or eyes--only their voice. But remember, even radio drama has sound effects, noises the characters would plausibly make in their time within a scene.

All right, you ask, how do I go about getting important information into the awareness of the reader? Have one or more characters interrupt or draw the wrong conclusions, or cause an immediate digression. The reader will become frustrated, which is considerably more positive than if the reader were to experience boredom.

Even when you are giving the impression of making things easy for the characters, your best approach is to make it as difficult as possible. In one of Graham Greene's undeservedly neglected thrillers, The Confidential Agent, the protagonist is sent to a foreign city where he is to meet a fellow spy, who is working as an instructor in a language school. They must observe the convention of speaking in an artificial language called Intrenaciono, a take-off on Esperanto. Thus the protagonist must wade through his instructions in this artificial language and not only make sense of it but translate his own reports. A great deal is at stake during the transaction, but if the two are to avoid detection, they must play by these artificial rules.

Talking heads represent missed opportunities at genuine story telling.

And now, it will not do you any good to complain about the laxity of enforcing such exchanges in already published work. They have all had the effect of causing literary agents and editors to be more determined than ever that you not be allowed to get away with having your characters emerge as talking heads.