Friday, December 18, 2020

Boring Is A Death Sentence

Boring is a word that no one should ever be using when talking about any article. To let readers die of boredom is the one way of career suicide the writer alone can prevent. Readers may die of heart attacks brought on by shock, they may choke on envious bile, they may asphyxiate on their hatred, but they may never exit an article feeling bored. Boring topics don't exist, only boring writers and authors.


I admit that there are slower and faster topics; there are topics that are easier to write about than others; there are stories with more appeal than others. But none of this means that anything needs to be boring. I found writers on the net writing about spiders or the production of tarmac; I don't like spiders and I care about tarmac as much as I care about the rules of the local knitting club. But these writers actually managed to get me to read their articles from beginning to end. And my interest started with the title.


Having tricked me in with a good title, they managed to tell what they wanted to say in an interesting and fascinating way that kept me on reading to the very end. I do not pretend that I remember what exactly they told me about either topic. But they kept me on their article reading about something I would normally have skipped entirely without a second thought. That is what writing is all about. Getting people to read your articles that wouldn't normally be interested in the topic you were asked to write about.


It is easy to write about something that fascinates you. Let me rephrase that: It seems easy to write about something that fascinates you. There are great dangers in that, too. Being fascinated in something brings added responsibility to the writer. They have to make sure that the reader is able to follow them in their fascination. The danger lies in presume too much prior knowledge in casual readers when writing about a hobby horse. 


Maybe writing about something that never interested you would be safer. It means that your knowledge of the matter is on a par with your readers'. As you work your way through the basics of the topic, your readers are able to follow your discoveries and your deductions. When writing about your favorite topic, you tend to make leaps and bounds that leave the readers' power of deduction lying in the dust. If that happens, whatever you write about becomes boring for lack of understanding.


All this means: If a topic or an article about a topic is boring, there is only one culprit. Writers have to exert their power of imagination to grab readers into whatever they are writing about. They have to stretch their abilities to accommodate all kinds of readers, too. While you make things interesting and readable, don't expect everyone else to share your sense of humor, that is the shortest way to get them into dying of boredom. It's safer to assume that your sense of humor is unique and that no one else understands it.

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