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

Just to be clear:
The question isn't "what does everyone find boring" but "what do you find boring". I doubt everyone finds the same thing boring - because if they did the author would decide "that's too boring to write".

I agree that getting a sense of place can be important, but the sense of place for a random field where nothing happens and we never see again? A place that matters not to the rest of the story?

Or knowing someone's age to the month if the exact age doesn't matter? I can see someone being described as "20 years, 11 months, and 26 days" if his 21st birthday is important, or if he's currently drinking somewhere the drinking age is 21, but if the age doesn't impact on the story then why say more than "he was almost 21" or "next week he would turn 21" or "he was late teens or early twenties"?

Stephen King's first published book was Carrie - a novel that told the tale of a weird high school student who had odd powers. At no point in that novel is Carrie ever described. I believe he mentioned the type of clothes she wore but King left her height, weight, eye colour, hair colour, etc blank because he knew the reader would know what she looked like. Each reader who reads that book sees that odd,out of place girl they knew in high school - and their memories of her fills her in more than a thousand words of description ever could.

Goodgulf

I have to agree with Gg on this subject. King did a great job at making us look back on the nerdy people we went to school with. King threw this manuscript in the trash at first. He didn't know anything about girls in high school and their private life even around other people. Their periods, their moods, their relationship even with themselves. It was his wife who picked it up, read it, and told him all about a girls moods and reactions to certain things. It made him a millionaire; or she did.

I don't like to overdue descriptive data in a story; any story. Hair, eyes, body, clothing is enough. Their personality will come to the reader in time. Other characters in the story are simply touched on. This is what bores me the most. However, in the LSF, I believe our authors do descriptive data well. One thing that must be touched on and, not lightly, is the spanking detail and the person's bottom. I believe everyone looks forward to those details. I know I do.

Actually I don't like to see spanking descriptions overdone - authors tend to end up resorting to glowing nates, crimson orbs and so on in an effort to avoid repitition. Having said that, I'm aware that a lot of readers love the detail so if I spent two hundred words studiously describing a tree and finished up with "... so he tied her to the tree and spanked her." then signed off I'd get complaints!

God! I answered so many people, and now that I've been to page 2 to finish off, everything has disappeared!
I'll start again!

Oh dear, MC !!!!
I have just submitted a rather descriptive piece for Flopsy to post - now I am in two minds whether to withdraw my submission In fact, unlike some of my other stories which really gloss over it, this one dwells on it - admittedly in a rather unusual way. I did not use specifically use the terms nates or orbs however, so I may just be OK.

But I will perhaps leave it in her queue for now.......perhaps I may have found a way to do this and still get away with it.

Please, what is SOG?


I still don't know what a multiple orgasm is, glad to have one from time to time!


You can just skip them, can't you? Of course that's what most of you would say about my baseball matches and poker games, but I feel it's different in some ways


So what would you write instead?
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The last thing I intended to do was having any author start considering what he/she should leave out in the future!
So this is an appeal to every author: please, don't change anything...except if you feel like describing a baseball game or a party poker

Ok, it's set in France, so maybe it will have some redeeming features !

How much description to include is a tricky and very individual decision for a writer. I find some stories too bare for my taste, some over filled with irrelevant descriptions. In some cases a detailed description of a character can illuminate the reader's impression of that character, and perhaps even more, can resonate with the reaction other characters have to the character being described. Then again, some writers have lush, poetic and colorful descriptions of the physical landscape (Jack Vance comes particularly to mind) while others have very spare, almost kabuki-like stage settings (Isaac Asimov comes to mind), and both work very well indeed.

AS for what bores me, mundane quotidian conversation that neither advances the plot, nor illuminates the characters or setting. Also, what Damon Knight called "False realism" -- the minute description of unimportant action. He cited as particularly common (this was a good many years ago) detai led description of the manner in which a character smoked a cigarette. Perhaps the most extreme version of this was in one of the notoriously padded Badger line of SF where some 10 pages are spent on the heroine brushing her teeth.

Oh and as to poker games and the like, a detailed description of a bridge game was essential to Agatha Christie's _Cards on the Table_ and a somewhat detailed description of a Mah Jong game was at least helpful to her _Murder of Roger Ackroyd_. And what would _Rounders_ have been without the detailed Poker scenes?

But then to any rules about "good writing" you can find an exception. I love the story of of the Lit professor who told his class "Form the very start of your book, you must make your characters LIVE. Your rader must feel taht they are vibrant and full of life" when a voice from the back of the room called out, "To begin with, Marley was dead." (which is of course the opening line of _A Christmas Carol_)

In a spanking story, i often like detailed physical descriptions of the spanking, although some of the best have lite or none of this. Emotional and relationship setups can be very enjoyable, but when they are poorly done and predictable, they can get very boring.

And as was said above, everyone's taste will differ in such matters.

-Don L.

J. Butcher's Dresden Files started as was started when he was taking classes on fiction writing, one of the points his teacher said to avoid were talking heads, characters who sole exist to give explosion to the readers.

in response he wrote Bob the Skull, a spirit of intellect the inhabits a skull who is Dresden's laboratory assistance and respiratory of magical knowledge.