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have you ever felt like quitting writing because of this? I know I have. There just comes a point when rereading a story you already know inside out and can retell by heart becomes nauseatingly boring. And yet you must reread it because who else will edit your novel for you? Beta readers are fine and all that, but they're only here to guide you -- you are the writer, the one who makes the final decision on what goes and what stays, so yes you'll need to read your own story again and again as if you were a reader.

Which is why it is important to be a reader. Writers don't live in a void, we don't write in a void, our writing is heavily influenced by life and what we read, by the fiction we consume. And lately I've been consuming a whole lot of boring fiction... stories where the protagonists go robotically from one event to the next, without feeling anything, without changing anything about themselves, without experiencing struggles, real struggles. Fiction that feels as stale as a slice of bread left uneaten on a plate overnight. This happens in movies, TV shows, anime, genre fiction, fanfiction, comics, and yes even in the esteemed well composed exalted form of Literary Fiction :bademoticon: who would've guessed?

Am I picking the wrong books to read? Could my tastes be changing? And what makes a boring story anyway? If it's only a matter of personal taste, it doesn't make much sense to write a blog about this, and yet here we are

So is your story actually boring, or are you merely projecting your writer's frustrations onto your story and boring yourself?

Personally I love drama (in fiction ) I think it adds that extra layer of conflict to a story, without which the story wouldn't be as satisfying to read, nor would the characters be as fun to root for. What makes me read books is (usually) not the question 'what will happen?' but questions like 'how will character x and character y resolve their issues?'. I like Romances, and the ending of Romance stories is (usually) predetermined (a happy ever after - HEA - for the main couple), so it's the How, not the What, that makes the story interesting. This is also why I don't care much for spoilers, and can enjoy a good story even after the ending is 'spoilt' for me.

Drama between two characters is an essential part of a story for me. Without drama, there might as well be no story. This is why I find a lot of Hard Sci Fi stories boring -- more often than not, the characters don't act human. There is so little interpersonal conflict that the characters may as well be processors inside a hivemind supercomputer, only performing actions that move the plot along. This is excusable, because those stories are not about people. Those stories are about technology, science, space, human achievements and mystery: the question what lies beyond our galaxy, where humans came from, where life itself originated from, is there a God? etc etc, all fine and dandy but that's not what I'm looking for in a fictional story (personal preferences, I know, I know, okay moving on.)

But the exact same thing happens in a lot of Romance stories -- characters act as puppets to move the plot along, they don't act human, they don't talk like people would, they don't feel human. That is inexcusable. Romance stories, Tragedies, Comedies, Drama is supposed to be about people, about how people interact with other people and how those interactions cause problems and hardship people need to overcome. Stories like that inspire us to do better in our own lives, to try harder, to git gud , to ask your crush out on a date, to ask your boss for a promotion, to pull an all nighter writing that presentation and chug 5 cups of Irish coffee an hour before the presentation to gather our spirits... and deal with your boss' wrath when he finds out.

Stories that have puppets for characters instead of people don't inspire anyone -- they sound false and feel fake... and eventually get rather boring. There's only so much phony one can take before the big SNOOZE sets in. And why should we waste our lives reading bad uninspiring fiction that lies to us? Fiction that is so drenched in falsehood it demotivates us and puts us to sleep? (unless you suffer from insomnia) After all,

Some writers try to cover up the fact their characters are nothing but puppets with 'special effects' like big ass explosions, car chases, tragic character deaths, out of the place explicit sex scenes that don't suit the characters, even, even going as far as giving their characters a traumatic past backstory ( my personal favorite: the insecure 50 year old who never overcame his childhood abuse... but somehow survived 32 years of adulthood without encountering any new trauma??). However these writers don't do the research these 'special effects' require, which results in unrealistic scenarios that only underscore how inhuman their characters are. Events like that cannot happen the way those writers wrote them. And people in the audience are going to know, especially if they have experienced these events firsthand.

A story filled to the brim with tragic death scenes, chases, battles, gunfights, fist fights, steamy sex, abuse, zombies, vampires, cheese-eating aliens can still be boring. (or it can be unintentionally hilarious, but that's beside the point). The point is that special effects do not a story make. A story doesn't need to have spectacular helicopter rides or 'exciting' fight scenes on a rooftop. You don't need death to enthrall your audience.

Because it's not events that make a good story, but it's characters who are interesting to watch. The reactions of the characters, how they perceive the events, that makes people read. A dead character cannot react to anything (unless you revive them somehow: zombie, undead, in Heaven or Hell, or just plain resurrected), so a character's death can only be interesting if it affects the remaining (main) characters in an interesting way.

A character's genuine emotional responses to an event are what the audience usually seeks in fiction. Of course, we're all different with different tastes and preferences when it comes to stories, but if audience ratings on goodreads or rottentomatoes are any indication, then people generally like to read about other people -- not cardboard cutouts pretending to be human.

Obviously characters are not human. They do not exist apart from what we believe them to be in our hearts and minds. Yet their actions, their words, their thoughts and feelings can be like those of real people. Or not. A lot of Literary characters go about their life not feeling anything deeply at all -- and that is how we perceive most people around us. We are not privy to their secrets, to their deep and heartfelt desires. Most people around you act cold and impersonal because you do not know them well, you are not BFFs, but that doesn't mean they have no feelings, or don't feel anything deeply. We are taught and trained to hide and deny our feelings in the workplace and around people we don't know well enough because there are some that would take advantage of those feelings. Fiction breaks the barrier between people by exposing the human soul underneath, or at least, it should. As Kafka wrote,

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” ~ Franz Kafka

This is why characters who barely react to life changing events don't feel genuine. We know in our hearts that this is not true, that (healthy) human beings do not react this way. And this ends all immersion with the story because we can no longer identify with the main characters, we can no longer accept their truth -- we don't want to believe it.

Tragic events or spectacular scenes can make a story more exciting, but only if the characters react to these events in a way that we can understand and perceive as being 'realistic'. This is different for each person because we all have different experiences, different lenses through which we view life. Indeed it can be difficult to relate to a character that is completely different from us and our understanding of life. Which is why most authors specifically write for certain 'target audiences' and try to create main characters that resemble the average person in their target audience. I don't see anything wrong with that, we all write with a certain audience in mind -- even if you don't think you are, if you claim you only write for fun, then you are also writing for a target audience (that audience is people like you, and you take yourself as the average person within that group) -- perfectly fine, after all you can't please everyone. If your target audience is younger or less experienced, you can get away with doing less research, and most of your readers won't notice a thing. The characters will seem like real people to them because they haven't experienced events that show the falsehood of your story.

But the backbone of your story is more than the set of (tragic/heroic or 'dazzling') events that make up your plot -- a good story rests on a character who wants something, cannot get it directly, and struggles throughout the entire story to obtain it. These struggles are as real as your character perceives them to be. Something as mundane and boring as finding a parking spot can be the major conflict in your story, as long as your character wants it enough to fight for it, a fight to the death.

There needn't be any actual death in your story -- but the character should feel like they're about to die. Rejection by a loved one can feel like death, heartbreak can feel like the end of the world, and yes we can hate someone so much we imagine their gruesome death in our head over and over again but we would never actually kill them. And besides negative feelings, (healthy) people have positive feelings too. It's alright to give your character a shot at happiness every once in awhile (if you have set up enough story conflict, it won't neuter the suspense), even if your story has a tragic ending. Too much tragedy can be a difficult pill to swallow, so it's best to break it up with some of those positive vibes :bademoticon:

Just like with the overblown tragic scenes, a character doesn't need much to be happy. They don't need to be rediscovered as the long lost child of some royal and crowned king, they don't need to win an election, they don't need to find the cure for cancer, and they don't need to marry a sexy hot billionaire who takes them on a helicopter ride to feel on top of the world. Nope -- a very small simple thing like looking at amazingly beautiful art can make your character feel elated.

The character doesn't have to act out all their feelings either (unless you have an over-the-top drama queen for a character), but they must feel them (and these feelings should be expressed in your story, either subtly through your character's body language, or explicitly by showing their thoughts from their POV). The story conflict should mean something to your character, it should make them feel something: they should feel threatened, enraged, scared, want to piss their pants and cry like a little baby, feel so happy they're going to explode, nervous with butterflies wringing their insides, on a climax so high they're never coming down again, glow with pride, experience real pain, they should feel on the verge of death. Then you will enthrall your audience and have them on the edge of their seat. Because we might all be different, but nobody hates an emotional rollercoaster. (except Seneca )

So is your story boring, specifically?

Well, look at your plot: does your character want something badly, bad enough they're willing to kill for it, to die for it? does getting what they want make your character feel like the happiest person alive? even if what they want is something minor like finding a parking spot?

Also look at your writing: do you show your character struggling against the odds? do you show your character's feelings? where do you show it? how? are your character's reactions believable (given the target audience you have in mind)?

If you don't know how to show something in a believable way, how to make it look realistic, research. Learn how other writers have handled such topics before. Read and learn about the topics themselves -- you don't have to be an expert football player to write a sports drama about high school lads playing football, but it helps to know something, especially if you intend to sell your story to high school aged football players .

TL;DR -- what a boring blog post

a) you haven't been paying Attention (go pay him now! )
b) no, your story is not boring. why do you even need to ask me?? I don't know your story, nobody knows it better than you do. you should be the one rooting for your own story, not strangers over the internet.
c) but ... but I thought you were my fwiend, not a stranger on the internet wtf kitty?
Please see above point a) ~~ a true friend would read my blog

:D (Big Grin) — Description
have you ever felt like quitting writing because of this? I know I have. There just comes a point when rereading a story you already know inside out and can retell by heart becomes nauseatingly boring. And yet you must reread it because who else will edit your novel for you? Beta readers are fine and all that, but they're only here to guide you -- you are the writer, the one who makes the final decision on what goes and what stays, so yes you'll need to read your own story again and again as if you were a reader.

Which is why it is important to be a reader. Writers don't live in a void, we don't write in a void, our writing is heavily influenced by life and what we read, by the fiction we consume. And lately I've been consuming a whole lot of boring fiction... stories where the protagonists go robotically from one event to the next, without feeling anything, without changing anything about themselves, without experiencing struggles, real struggles. Fiction that feels as stale as a slice of bread left uneaten on a plate overnight. This happens in movies, TV shows, anime, genre fiction, fanfiction, comics, and yes even in the esteemed well composed exalted form of Literary Fiction :bademoticon: who would've guessed?

Am I picking the wrong books to read? Could my tastes be changing? And what makes a boring story anyway? If it's only a matter of personal taste, it doesn't make much sense to write a blog about this, and yet here we are

So is your story actually boring, or are you merely projecting your writer's frustrations onto your story and boring yourself?

Personally I love drama (in fiction ) I think it adds that extra layer of conflict to a story, without which the story wouldn't be as satisfying to read, nor would the characters be as fun to root for. What makes me read books is (usually) not the question 'what will happen?' but questions like 'how will character x and character y resolve their issues?'. I like Romances, and the ending of Romance stories is (usually) predetermined (a happy ever after - HEA - for the main couple), so it's the How, not the What, that makes the story interesting. This is also why I don't care much for spoilers, and can enjoy a good story even after the ending is 'spoilt' for me.

Drama between two characters is an essential part of a story for me. Without drama, there might as well be no story. This is why I find a lot of Hard Sci Fi stories boring -- more often than not, the characters don't act human. There is so little interpersonal conflict that the characters may as well be processors inside a hivemind supercomputer, only performing actions that move the plot along. This is excusable, because those stories are not about people. Those stories are about technology, science, space, human achievements and mystery: the question what lies beyond our galaxy, where humans came from, where life itself originated from, is there a God? etc etc, all fine and dandy but that's not what I'm looking for in a fictional story (personal preferences, I know, I know, okay moving on.)

But the exact same thing happens in a lot of Romance stories -- characters act as puppets to move the plot along, they don't act human, they don't talk like people would, they don't feel human. That is inexcusable. Romance stories, Tragedies, Comedies, Drama is supposed to be about people, about how people interact with other people and how those interactions cause problems and hardship people need to overcome. Stories like that inspire us to do better in our own lives, to try harder, to git gud , to ask your crush out on a date, to ask your boss for a promotion, to pull an all nighter writing that presentation and chug 5 cups of Irish coffee an hour before the presentation to gather our spirits... and deal with your boss' wrath when he finds out.

Stories that have puppets for characters instead of people don't inspire anyone -- they sound false and feel fake... and eventually get rather boring. There's only so much phony one can take before the big SNOOZE sets in. And why should we waste our lives reading bad uninspiring fiction that lies to us? Fiction that is so drenched in falsehood it demotivates us and puts us to sleep? (unless you suffer from insomnia) After all,

Some writers try to cover up the fact their characters are nothing but puppets with 'special effects' like big ass explosions, car chases, tragic character deaths, out of the place explicit sex scenes that don't suit the characters, even, even going as far as giving their characters a traumatic past backstory ( my personal favorite: the insecure 50 year old who never overcame his childhood abuse... but somehow survived 32 years of adulthood without encountering any new trauma??). However these writers don't do the research these 'special effects' require, which results in unrealistic scenarios that only underscore how inhuman their characters are. Events like that cannot happen the way those writers wrote them. And people in the audience are going to know, especially if they have experienced these events firsthand.

A story filled to the brim with tragic death scenes, chases, battles, gunfights, fist fights, steamy sex, abuse, zombies, vampires, cheese-eating aliens can still be boring. (or it can be unintentionally hilarious, but that's beside the point). The point is that special effects do not a story make. A story doesn't need to have spectacular helicopter rides or 'exciting' fight scenes on a rooftop. You don't need death to enthrall your audience.

Because it's not events that make a good story, but it's characters who are interesting to watch. The reactions of the characters, how they perceive the events, that makes people read. A dead character cannot react to anything (unless you revive them somehow: zombie, undead, in Heaven or Hell, or just plain resurrected), so a character's death can only be interesting if it affects the remaining (main) characters in an interesting way.

A character's genuine emotional responses to an event are what the audience usually seeks in fiction. Of course, we're all different with different tastes and preferences when it comes to stories, but if audience ratings on goodreads or rottentomatoes are any indication, then people generally like to read about other people -- not cardboard cutouts pretending to be human.

Obviously characters are not human. They do not exist apart from what we believe them to be in our hearts and minds. Yet their actions, their words, their thoughts and feelings can be like those of real people. Or not. A lot of Literary characters go about their life not feeling anything deeply at all -- and that is how we perceive most people around us. We are not privy to their secrets, to their deep and heartfelt desires. Most people around you act cold and impersonal because you do not know them well, you are not BFFs, but that doesn't mean they have no feelings, or don't feel anything deeply. We are taught and trained to hide and deny our feelings in the workplace and around people we don't know well enough because there are some that would take advantage of those feelings. Fiction breaks the barrier between people by exposing the human soul underneath, or at least, it should. As Kafka wrote,

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” ~ Franz Kafka

This is why characters who barely react to life changing events don't feel genuine. We know in our hearts that this is not true, that (healthy) human beings do not react this way. And this ends all immersion with the story because we can no longer identify with the main characters, we can no longer accept their truth -- we don't want to believe it.

Tragic events or spectacular scenes can make a story more exciting, but only if the characters react to these events in a way that we can understand and perceive as being 'realistic'. This is different for each person because we all have different experiences, different lenses through which we view life. Indeed it can be difficult to relate to a character that is completely different from us and our understanding of life. Which is why most authors specifically write for certain 'target audiences' and try to create main characters that resemble the average person in their target audience. I don't see anything wrong with that, we all write with a certain audience in mind -- even if you don't think you are, if you claim you only write for fun, then you are also writing for a target audience (that audience is people like you, and you take yourself as the average person within that group) -- perfectly fine, after all you can't please everyone. If your target audience is younger or less experienced, you can get away with doing less research, and most of your readers won't notice a thing. The characters will seem like real people to them because they haven't experienced events that show the falsehood of your story.

But the backbone of your story is more than the set of (tragic/heroic or 'dazzling') events that make up your plot -- a good story rests on a character who wants something, cannot get it directly, and struggles throughout the entire story to obtain it. These struggles are as real as your character perceives them to be. Something as mundane and boring as finding a parking spot can be the major conflict in your story, as long as your character wants it enough to fight for it, a fight to the death.

There needn't be any actual death in your story -- but the character should feel like they're about to die. Rejection by a loved one can feel like death, heartbreak can feel like the end of the world, and yes we can hate someone so much we imagine their gruesome death in our head over and over again but we would never actually kill them. And besides negative feelings, (healthy) people have positive feelings too. It's alright to give your character a shot at happiness every once in awhile (if you have set up enough story conflict, it won't neuter the suspense), even if your story has a tragic ending. Too much tragedy can be a difficult pill to swallow, so it's best to break it up with some of those positive vibes :bademoticon:

Just like with the overblown tragic scenes, a character doesn't need much to be happy. They don't need to be rediscovered as the long lost child of some royal and crowned king, they don't need to win an election, they don't need to find the cure for cancer, and they don't need to marry a sexy hot billionaire who takes them on a helicopter ride to feel on top of the world. Nope -- a very small simple thing like looking at amazingly beautiful art can make your character feel elated.

The character doesn't have to act out all their feelings either (unless you have an over-the-top drama queen for a character), but they must feel them (and these feelings should be expressed in your story, either subtly through your character's body language, or explicitly by showing their thoughts from their POV). The story conflict should mean something to your character, it should make them feel something: they should feel threatened, enraged, scared, want to piss their pants and cry like a little baby, feel so happy they're going to explode, nervous with butterflies wringing their insides, on a climax so high they're never coming down again, glow with pride, experience real pain, they should feel on the verge of death. Then you will enthrall your audience and have them on the edge of their seat. Because we might all be different, but nobody hates an emotional rollercoaster. (except Seneca )

So is your story boring, specifically?

Well, look at your plot: does your character want something badly, bad enough they're willing to kill for it, to die for it? does getting what they want make your character feel like the happiest person alive? even if what they want is something minor like finding a parking spot?

Also look at your writing: do you show your character struggling against the odds? do you show your character's feelings? where do you show it? how? are your character's reactions believable (given the target audience you have in mind)?

If you don't know how to show something in a believable way, how to make it look realistic, research. Learn how other writers have handled such topics before. Read and learn about the topics themselves -- you don't have to be an expert football player to write a sports drama about high school lads playing football, but it helps to know something, especially if you intend to sell your story to high school aged football players .

TL;DR -- what a boring blog post

a) you haven't been paying Attention (go pay him now! )
b) no, your story is not boring. why do you even need to ask me?? I don't know your story, nobody knows it better than you do. you should be the one rooting for your own story, not strangers over the internet.
c) but ... but I thought you were my fwiend, not a stranger on the internet wtf kitty?
Please see above point a) ~~ a true friend would read my blog