TIP: When Your Writing Bores Even You

This is from A Writers Book of Days by Judy Reeves

When your writing bores even you

Boring writing happens when writers (a) get lazy, (b) keep treading the same old territory, (c) hold back, (d) play safe, or (e) get too comfortable. Here are some symptoms and antidotes.

A. Lazy Writers
Their verbs graze the hillside like fat cows and their nouns are like cornmeal mush. Their color palette is a six-pack of crayons and the only textures they mention are soft or hard. Their dialogue would make Leave It to Beaver sound clever and they've set new records for "number of cliches in one paragraph." They ignore doors that might be opened and never look out any windows.

Antidote:
Play word games, experiment with language, audition words. Use the thesaurus, appropriate a set of paint chips from Home Depot and study the names of colors, take sensory inventories, practice dialogue, eavesdrop on conversations, read Raymond Carver, Pam Houston, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore. Reread your work and mark doors and windows. Open and enter during writing-practice exercises.

B. Same Old Territory
We've all heard this story before. And before that and before that. Like the line from the old Herman and the Hermits song "I'm Henry the First, I am," Second verse/same as the first; it's another rewrite of the same interminable scene with only a few words changed, or it's another retread of the same story about the same characters singing the same tune. Boring!

Antidote:
Free-write using writing-practice prompts, writing only new material for the next month. No rewriting or editing allowed! Ban those characters from any further appearances in any stories from now on. Send them to the Retirement Home for Overused Characters. Flip everything: gender, ago, profession, politics, hair color, diction, intelligence, geography, sexual preferences. Everything!

C. Holding Back
When vague words like "terrible," "difficult," and "painful" make regular appearances, or when cliches like "brokenhearted," "sobbing like a child," or "flew into a rage" are used to describe feelings, you can be fairly certain the writer is holding back. It's hard to care about people or characters who are held at arm's length by abstract words and hackneyed phrases. Readers want the real stuff: the truth.

Antidote:
Ask what was it exactly that made something terrible? In what ways was it difficult? What did the pain feel like? Use concrete details and specific images. Use words that describe the terrible, difficult, painful. Write through the cliche with a fresh simile or metaphor. Ask what a broke heart feels like, looks like. What other body parts are affected and how? Find fresh images. Go to your own experience, bring to mind a memory of a time you were brokenhearted, when you sobbed like a child, when you flew into a rage: describe your behavior and your feelings. Take the time to stay with the feeling and write down what you experience.

D. Playing Safe
Safe writing is about as exciting as the seventh inning stretch at a bush league ball game when the score is 13-0, visitor's favor. No wonder we're all yawning. Nothing's at stake here. So the cleanup batter his a foul and broke his bat? Who cares. So the team's winning pitcher gets relieved by the kid up from the sagebrush league. Are we staying for the rest of this game or are we going across the street for a beer?

Antidote:
Write what matters. Be a passionate writer. Don't waste time writing about anything you don't care about. Also, for a reader to be involved in what she's reading, something must be at stake. There must be some kind of tension in the writing to keep the reader's attention. Crank up the heat, put some obstacles in the way of your characters. "Writing is not like parenting," said writer Romelda Shaffer. "Torrent, confusion, obstacles, and catastrophes are good things."
When a writer is playing safe, you can bet the censor or critic is somewhere nearby.

E. Too Comfortable
The writing is humming along. Show up at writing practice everyday, same time, no problems. Writing is easy, four, five pages a day, meeting those goals. Found a genre that works, a groove that fits. Know how to play those plots and story lines, can write a poem on a dime; no surprises, no hassles. The writing business: easy pie.

Antidote:
Just like the antidote for "playing safe," this writer needs to create some tension, crack up the heat, experience a little confusion. Recommended: change the time and place of the daily writing practice. Raise the bar to more pages every day. Switch genres, try something new. Don't fit so easily in the groove, feel the bumps and ridges, the sharp edge. Let your writing surprise you, keep you awake at night. If a writer is too comfortable, you can bet there aren't any risks being taken. No risks=boring writing.

"Beware of creating tedium!" said the prodigious Anthony Trollope. "I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the senses that the thing is becoming long has grown upon him, he may be sure that it will grow upon his readers."

 

thanks!!! very useful tips

 

I don't think I'm bored so much as challenged, in a way. I've got a thousand ideas in my head, but putting them into the computer is beginning to feel like data entry-and thats BORING!

I've written OVER 150 pages in a month, and in this particular part of what I call "My Series", I can't seem to find the end.

So I'm writing on, and maybe I'll find a way to do a better job of proof-reading and editting in a few months when I've (hopefully) gone on to the next part.

I have 2 chapters of that finished, the beginning-and the end.

I need to re-write Part 1. I had it on hard copy 20 years ago, but its long gone now, I can remember bits of it, so I'm hoping my powers of invention will see me through that task.

Part 2 is done, but I'm floundering at the end of Part 3.

Suggestions please.

Thank you
Lois

 

that's a big ass rock.