What do you find boring to tears in a story/book?

I'll give two examples:
1) The description of a baseball, football, handball match...(any sport in fact), even if it's to show the character's skill at the end of the game.
Furthermore, have you noticed the young hero is always a "quarterback", whatever that means and not that I care?
2) The long drawn-out detailed explanation of a game of poker.
Since you can't expect every reader to understand or to be interested, I strongly suspect it's just for the author to show off his mastering of the subject.
Anyway for me it's and

Complete physical descriptions of everything. Unless it's important to the plot I don't need to know someone's exact age, their weight to the ounce (or gram), their exact height etc and I certainly don't need to page after page of description about the world.

That's what got me off the Wheel of Time books before the spanking started - he would take three to five pages to say "They walked across the field" by including details of the grass, flowers, trees, bushes, animals, the smell of the wind, etc that had no importance to the story. Yes, he painted rich scenes, but after a while the details became too boring to read.

Goodgulf

The description of approx. two thousand sexual intercourses in SOG.

I would disagree with that and argue it depends on how the imagery is portrayed. Look at how wonderful flopsy's story's are. She paints the most delightful imagery ever with her poetic words.

To me, a spanking story is boring if it is JUST the description of a spanking with no, or barely any, character or plot development.


I so agree with that! Especially since they all resulted in unrealistic orgasms every time! I am pretty sure she had multiple orgasms every time she saw his naked chest!! Yeah right!!!!???

I must tell you I think a sense of place is important in a story and I tend to take extra care to develop that aspect. I like to learn something new and interesting when I read a story, yes, even a spanking story. One with rich details of a certain historical period hold a great deal of charm for me. Victorian tales with period costumes are delicious. Those set in the 50s and especially the 60s carry their own merit.

Military maneuvers and strategies, not so much and yes, I agree play by play descriptions of sporting events are non starters.
And sex? well, I think spanking and sex are inexorably linked, at least for me, but I try not to be too unrealistic.

All good points. Give the reader enough information to get a sense of the people and places, just don't run on and on, ad infinitum. Yes, I enjoy imagery and poetry and also that there's often a linkage between spanking and sex. So, there has to be more to a story than just the smacks and whacks.

Detailed descriptions can make a setting memorable and can also add a lot to a story. The kind of writing that I enjoy the most would probably be greatly diminished without it.

That said, it is very easy for a writer to go overboard. The later books in Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series (that's the one that begins with Clan Of The Cave Bear ) really dragged for me because of that. Just because a couple of people are making a very long journey across prehistoric Europe, that doesn't mean the readers need a detailed description of every bird, plant and rock along the way.

The worst example I've ever come across though was in James Michener's Centennial . The book is mainly about the founding and growth of a town in the old West. It follows the story through several generations and like many of his works was a best-seller. Here's what had me groaning though. The author devoted the first fifty pages to describing the geological forces that shaped the land where the town was eventually founded. The pushing of tectonic plates caused this part to be higher than the rest, volcanic activity 50 million years ago gave this hill its current shape, the erosion of the this river carved the valley below over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, etc., etc., etc. I kid you not. Fifty pages! That was way, way, WAY too much background for me.

I absolutely agree. I find that I spend a disproportionate amount of my writing time setting the scene....it is so important as to the mood of how the story will play out.

Could this be a 'Men are from Mars, Women from Venus' thing?

Clothes! - I don't mind mentions of what the character is wearing as part of their introductory description - but some (mostly female) authors have pages detailing every item in their protagonist's wardrobe and the decision-making progress they go through each time they change outfits - which they do frequently! I'd rather just assume the character is wearing clothes unless it's important to the plot...

Someone needs to mention onomatopoeia. It's great to describe the magnificent sound of a palm impacting on firm butflesh, or describe how the spanking sound echos around the room, or flies out the window to be heard by neighbors, but we don't need WHAP WHAP WHAP, or SPANK SPANK SPANK.