Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Tim O'Brien on boring:

The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer.

Full article here.

Man, I love that guy. Brilliant article. And he's one of the great writers, in my opinion.

Loved the article, and I have to agree the biggest reason I put down a book is boredom. For me, good writing isn't enough to sustain my interest in a dull story. But an exciting story can make me overlook sloppy writing.

Haha - I guess I'm finding the article boring because I keep skipping around to all my other tabs.

Ah, it gets good towards the end.

Yeah, I've seen that whole dynamic at work before. On some Sims 2 story forums back in the day, the ones mostly populated by teenagers, I'd post excerpts from the story I was working on and get lambasted for not describing every freaking thing in the story - and note, these were Sims stories. With pictures. But apparently, even with pictures, I was supposed to share the hair and eye and skin color of all of the characters and go into immense detail about the bedcovers and the carpet and the dresser and the walls. Oh, and can't forget minute descriptions of the clothes the characters are wearing.

To quote one poster "Tell, don't show."

Yeah. Dude. Even when I was a teenager myself I knew better than that. If I don't have a character or plot related reason to inform the reader of hair and eye color and clothes and the exact coloring of the carpet and furniture, I don't do it.