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Almost everytime I log onto this message board I think about leaving and never coming back. I scan through the topics, see nothing which captures my attention, think about leaving, think about the delicious but frightening burden of spare time, and end up staying. Sometimes, I read other peoples work - good or bad (mostly bad), there is something interesting in the activity as long as you only do it every once in a while, otherwise it just becomes a blur, the neon colored hairstyles mixing into a dull brown and all unhappy families feeling more or less alike. I got to thinking about this: what is the one major problem with stories here? Apart from the usual addressed things of grammar and such, why can't I read these stories for too long a time? The answer, I figure, is in that dull brown blur: they're simply boring.

Think back to one of your favourite books. Notice, when your mind pieces it together the methods it uses to construct meaning. The thing that always interests me about this process is what details the mind selects, remembers, in order to create a "montage" of the novel - a film's preview in reverse, constructed after the piece has been seen. These images, sentences, which stay fresh for years after the fact, always interest me. These are the things that somehow leave an impression, effect you enough to take up precious space in your mind. I try it with one of my favourite books, Vladamir Nabokov's Lolita:

- Lolita mispronouncing en suit as en soot.
- Lolita and Humbert Humbert stopping off at any shop which advertises "Ice Cold" drinks, despite the fact drinks are served everywhere ice cold.
- Humbert Humbert speaking with his tongue out, asking if he should lick a speck or hair out of Lolita's eye: "Yeth, thall I tly?"(or something).
- Lolita peeling the orange.
- Humbert rejecting to play "Russian Roulette" because it's an automatic, not a revolver.

Another, Nabokov's Ada

- Ada describing comparing the veins on Van's erect p***s to the rivers on a map of Africa.
- Van stuffing his arms in Lucette's sleeves as they embrace.
- Grace saying "No, he watches" about the chauffeur as Van and her try to make love in the back of a car.
- Van admiring his perfect stool samples on two separate occasions.
- Ada scratching her mosquito bites on her legs till she bled.
- The hole in Ada's swimsuit.

Now, the important thing here is that none of these points are essential to the plot - you can take any and all out and the stories will still be the same on a narrative level. Not only that, the majority of these things are revealed quickly in passing - generally, none of these points are focused on. But all of these stay with me stronger then the actual plot as a whole; they are signposts, though what they are signing is left delightfully obscure.

I make a note of these here, because the main problem I have when reading amateur (and a lot of published) work, is that I am left with, in a sense, nothing. All that remains: the dusty skeleton of a plot, nothing real interesting, no memories to keep. So, my advice how to avoid this? Write Interesting. All these things I remember are somehow interesting - they have an element of poignancy, of strangeness or ordinary surrealism, or just something to define them as salient. So many people write boring; they write about boring things with boring descriptions. Their work is just noise. I forget who said it, but I always liked the quote "Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice." Too many are just writing things that will be read once - like an advertisement, or a sign signaling a detour on a road. As good technically as your writing is - even if you've got the pacing down, the grammar perfect, your work will always be secondary to people who are just talented at writing interesting.

So how do you go about this then? How do you go about creating interesting writing? Well, I'm glad you asked (you're really helping me out here, thank you). I think too many mistake what "interesting" actually is - they get it confused with things like scale, or action. To give examples of each:


Purely as is, this is not interesting. It is big, sure, but it is not interesting. Why do I care that it's a thousand year war? Why do I care about the fate of a fictional humanity. The image it creates is epic and all sorts of horrific, but in the end, actually pretty dull. It could be made interesting with the smaller details, but the point is, it's scale doesn't make it interesting on its own.



Again, this can be made interesting, but the point here is that relying on the concept of an action scene is not interesting writing. People often think, because they see a great car chase in a movie, they can put it into writing and it will still be exciting. This is very, very wrong. Cinema and writing are just so different in their approach to an audience; cinema relies a lot on sensation: images and sound, writing relies on intellectual stimulation: conscious and subconscious thought. One problem I see frequently is with people writing fight scenes - they describe all the exciting events, all the thwacking of blades and such, but it is just so boring to read on paper, since there is nothing interesting, nothing standing out there. It might look interesting on screen, with the sheer speed and skill of it, but on paper, there is no stimulation there, nothing salient for the mind to latch onto.

Obviously, what is interesting specifically differs person to person, but I want to emphasis the aspect of sophistication here - narrative is everywhere, we are surrounded by it, so you need something in your work to somehow separate it - a sophisticated approach to description or to action or to image. And obviously I can't really tell you what to put into a story, or how to describe it, that would make it interesting, that's obviously the author's duty. What's worse too is how ambiguous it is, and how it changes every time - something which is interesting in one context is boring in another. I guess all I can say is read your stories, look through them, and try to think if there is something there which separates it from every other similar story that the reader can keep with them. Something which is not everyday, or something which is so everyday it's somehow magnificent. As I said, it's terribly ambiguous. My mother is excellent at spotting these things, after we watch a movie together she'll say something like "I liked the way he took of her shoes before she went to sleep" and I'll suddenly realize just how poignant or captivating that little detail is. I really put this emphasis into my own work, usually without thinking too, sometimes going out of my way to, but always recognizing the importance of making my stories memorable, because if I come away with a reader keeping something of mine in their head - taking up space that could be used to remember their partner's birthday or where they hid the spare house key, then I would have succeeded.

Thinking as I write, maybe it's ambiguous because it isn't concrete. Actually, no maybe: It's ambiguous because it isn't concrete. And thinking further, maybe it just deals in how you see the world around you. Yes, that makes some sense - writers often write these interesting things well because they notice these things in their everyday life. Part of writing from experience is writing about things you've done, accomplished and experienced - another part is just writing things you've noticed and things which stood out. I am undecided if this is something you are born with or not then, because it's just a way of seeing the world. Speaking with no false humility, I would say I'm very good at this, but I've always been observant, and post 17 years old, have always been on the look out for images which somehow strike me as story worthy. Because I find that it's in the mundane, the everyday, that you see the most bizarre things around you, which are made all the more bizarre by the fact that everyone is accepting them as mundane and everyday (which they also are). This is why a writers like John Updike are so brilliant at contemporary settings, because they spot things that when the literary light is shined on, just look amazing or insane. The example from Lolita, of Lol wanting to stop at everywhere that advertised "Ice Cold" drinks is a good example of this. It is true: everywhere drinks are advertised as ice cold as some kind of selling point, but more then that, it says a lot about Lol's character - like many teenage girls she is a slave to marketing and advertising, she is superficial and acts on whims. It's also funny when written in Nabokov's through Humbert's dry tone. See? It's just good writing. You can accomplish so much just by taking the path less traveled.

Anyway, this is the concluding paragraph and thinking it through I'm not entirely sure I said anything practical that you can actually use, and I think I created more for myself then I actually answered. Regardless, I hope it at least made you think about the point I am trying to make. You may have all the technical writing skills in the world, you may know everything about syntax and sentence structure - you may know everything their is to know about story arches and narrative conventions, but if you don't write interesting, and this is incredibly obvious, but, your work will be boring.

I am aware of this, I am saying "Write Interesting" as the concept of "interesting", not "interestingly".

Thanks for the kind words Hawthorne, but if I knew this was an essay I would have... done... better. Actually I wouldn't have written it because I hate writing essays razz .

Yeah, the "writing anime" one is always out there. I can sympathise, it must be frustrating having your prefered narrative medium (not that anime is a medium... or a genre... but, um... sub-medium? Multi-genre?) totally inacsessable in terms of actual production. I mean, even if they wrote an awesome anime story, they wouldn't be able to get a single person to look at it on account of them being not Japanese and 13 years old. Must be frustrating... I dunno, you'd think most would give up when they re-read and find that a boomerang sword just isn't that impressive in written form.

I love this. Excellent job, Heidi! Quite the interesting analysis.

I hadn't really thought about it, but my style of writing does differ a bit between when I write prose and when I write in screenplay format. I like being able to throw those extra little details into a prose story that make it fun and interesting--or hopefully interesting, at any rate. (I also like the challenge of telling a story visually, which is why I like to play with screenplay format at times, although I have yet to finish a script for a full-length film.)

At any rate, I promise to do my best to write interesting from here on out. whee

all in all Heidi made a good point and I too found his piece of writing to be quite interesting. very much appreciated, Heidi no Lux.