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.