Writers argue about everything.\u00a0\u00a0 We hold different views on what other writers *should* write about, what topics are too something (ordinary, fantastic, political, politically naive, mundane, exotic, narrow, broad…) or not enough something (same list), how writers should handle certain topics, if writers should use some hot-button term, whether a phrase in common use 150 years ago to mean X can be used now to mean X when its more common contemporary meaning is XZ, and if the work is a historical novel, does that make any difference or not.\u00a0 We don’t agree on what is meant by “strong characters” with any adjective you might insert between “strong” and “character.\u00a0 We don’t agree on the validity of many terms that describe writing, and even if we agree the terms are valid, we won’t agree on the examples.\u00a0 We don’t agree on whether readers should be allowed any (and how much) pleasure from reading, or whether the reader should be treated harshly, like a student in a prison school.<\/p>\n
So what does this mean for readers?\u00a0 Whatever they want it to mean, in one sense.\u00a0 Readers disagree just as much about books and writers as writers disagree about books, readers, and ways of constructing stories.\u00a0 Or nonstories, if they’re on the other side of the canyon from me.\u00a0 If you read literary criticism, or any criticism, you will run right into the flamewars and catfights, with general agreement on very few things.\u00a0 Reading lit-crit is, however, educational (even when you disagree with it) but I always take an entire box of salt with me when I indulge.\u00a0 I recommend the same caution to you.\u00a0 Writers writing about books, or other writers, or the writing process are not always right.\u00a0 Least right are those laying down the laws they think govern writing.\u00a0\u00a0 Exceptions are everywhere.\u00a0\u00a0 I would say (laying down one of my laws) that if you want to write fiction, you should not take any one writer as having all the laws that apply to you and your writing.\u00a0 There is one fundamental law that I don’t recall seeing in any article on writing–not as direct as this, at least.\u00a0 Don’t bore the reader.<\/em>\u00a0 You can write anything and find someone who loves it IF you don’t bore the reader.\u00a0 What bores readers is highly various: some like explosions and car chases and are bored by long conversations about the meaning of life.\u00a0 Others like long conversations about the meaning of life–or a discourse on some odd thing they didn’t know before–or a stark and vivid sex scene–but find explosions and car chases boring.<\/p>\n So it may seem that Don’t bore the reader<\/em> is useless, because you can’t know what everyone who looks at your story is bored by.\u00a0\u00a0 Luckily, there’s a\u00a0 useful\u00a0 gloss on that law.\u00a0 Since you can’t ensure that every potential reader will be interested in everything you write, you must take care (in any topic, any genre, any action or description or conversation), not to bore the reader who is already interested<\/em> in that topic, genre, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Your target audience.\u00a0 The people you have the most chance of entertaining.\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately,\u00a0 most of us have found that not every book or short story on a\u00a0 favorite topic works.\u00a0 As a child I read every horse-related book in our local library and school libraries.\u00a0 “Horses” was my favorite topic.\u00a0 But I found some horse books boring despite being intensely interested in the topic.\u00a0 Among the horse-besotted friends of mine, we usually agreed on which weren’t worth the time.\u00a0\u00a0 Don’t bore the horse lovers with your fictional horses.\u00a0\u00a0 Or the car enthusiasts with your fictional cars.<\/p>\n What was boring to us in those books?\u00a0 Moralizing about horses.\u00a0 Black Beauty<\/em>, for instance.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us had read a child’s picture-book version and liked it well enough.\u00a0\u00a0 The full-length book, however, was a disappointment: it was a sermon about horse abuse, not really the story of a horse (to us.)\u00a0 Going on and on about stuff we already knew about horses…infodumping.\u00a0\u00a0 Details that–though about horses–weren’t in character for the human, or plotworthy for the story.\u00a0 We didn’t know, in the years I was reading all those horse books, how to define what was boring, but we sure knew how to skip those sentences or paragraphs.\u00a0\u00a0 While writing, I often include whatever comes to mind while I’m writing a passage–but I don’t expect it all to survive the Chainsaw of Correction during revision.\u00a0\u00a0 I may need to explain, for myself, why a character is doing something, but the reader usually doesn’t want all the explanation.\u00a0\u00a0 I need to show<\/em> the emotional motivation, not infodump it and its relatives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writers argue about everything.\u00a0\u00a0 We hold different views on what other writers *should* write about, what topics are too something (ordinary, fantastic, political, politically naive, mundane, exotic, narrow, broad…) or not enough something (same list), how writers should handle certain topics, if writers should use some hot-button term, whether a phrase in common use 150 Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,25],"tags":[7,26],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","category-writers-toolkit","tag-the-writing-life","tag-tools-for-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":557,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions\/557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}