What makes a story boring?

-#1 sin of a story is to make it boring.

We all have different opinions on what makes a story "fun", but what to you think kills a story and makes it tedious. I think every story teller is in competition with basically everything that could be enterteintment for the audience.

What do you think you should avoid?

Personally I have found that the more tell rather than showing a story has the more boring it, becomes. what about you?

edited 11th Oct '14 8:27:47 AM by fallenlegend

I think one factor is that the audience must care about the characters and what is happening to them. If you want to avoid a boring story, you need to avoid things like Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy and the Eight Deadly Words. Making the characters well written does not always equate with an engaging story, but if people like them, they are more likely to read on.

... Of course, you will also need an appropriately dramatic plot. Too simple and the audience doesn't care, but too complex and difficult and the audience might feel like things are so impossible that the characters won't win anyway, regardless of if they do or not - by then, people stop reading.

Laconic : I think it helps to have a good balance between characters and plot. The plot should be complex but not impossible and it should not make the characters act stupid, or Ooc, just for the sake of a good story. Now this begs the question, how to go about doing this.

And I do agree with the OP as well ; showing instead of telling can be very, very boring to read.

Good god, irrelevant tedious exposition. I say this as someone who's been guilty of this in the past, but does it ever piss me off to read paragraph upon paragraph of extraneous information with no relevance to plot or character.

Well, Eight Deadly Words covers one aspect of this pretty nicely: If the story fails to make you emotionally invested in the characters, you stop caring what happens to them, resulting in the story coming out as boring.

What you (the OP) are describing has more to do with pacing; the slower the plot moves forward, the bigger the danger of boring your readers. Of course taking things slow is often required in order to build the mood of the story properly, but in some genres this is not that easy to achieve.

For example in horror readers are often Just Here for Godzilla, which makes it difficult to establish the setting and characters without making them lose interest in the story.

'd.

edited 11th Oct '14 9:12:05 AM by Paradisesnake

similarly, I am especially bored by long paragraphs that may be full of interesting information (or even interesting actions) but because it all happens in one long clump of words, I find it difficult to read and so I get bored.

Well, pacing is certainly part of what I was saying. But I am also saying that bigger and more dramatic plots might, ironically, be boring instead because the plot might come off as impossible to achieve or it might simply be influencing the characters so much that the audience loses interest in them.

... Now that I think about it, it has a ton to do with pacing...

edited 11th Oct '14 9:15:40 AM by Sibuna

This might be a bit too specific, but a story tends to get boring when things happen too conveniently for the protagonists. Characters get the girl/maintain relationships with minimal effort, any problem the characters might be facing either gets resolved instantly, the resolution is unearned or the problem is bypassed entirely, you get the idea. If the story does this often then there is no weight to anything that happens to the protagonists, and the audience just stops caring.

edited 11th Oct '14 9:59:34 AM by Elfhunter

Telling instead of showing, slow pacing, and (over)use of the Idiot Ball.

Also, in a serial work, Status Quo Is God.

A lack of conflict, or a conflict so trite and overdone that the audience can see the end coming a mile away.

Really wonky pacing, such as taking 300 pages just to get to your Inciting Incident, or leaving long stretches where nothing of importance to the plot occurs.

An extremely dull or bland main character, a main character with no personal motivation or stake in the plot's outcome, or a main character who just gets bossed around by other, more proactive characters.

Haha, that's awesome. Depending somewhat on interpretation, all five of those are present in the thing I'm writing (and a number of books I enjoy) as intentional stylistic features.

Some things that make a work boring to me are:

• Bad writing (as in genuinely unskilful writing. Writing that intentionally breaks the rules of 'good writing' can, if utilized right, be awesome.)
• Aesops and messages of any kind. Ideally, I think you should be able to read a whole work without ever figuring out the author's opinions on the issues explored.
• Representative symbolism (for example, giving the main character a caged dove to symbolize their state of trappedness) because it ruins all the potential flavour and nuance of narrative detail in favour of a game of search-and-replace.
• Aesthetically and conceptually uninteresting settings, plots and characters.
• Conflicts where the reader is clearly supposed to root for one party and against another.
• Sloppy editing. Sections that don't help advance the plot, characters or other overarching features of the book.

Christ I'm pretentious.

edited 12th Oct '14 12:44:53 AM by ArtisticPlatypus

Haha, that's awesome. Depending somewhat on interpretation, all five of those are present in the thing I'm writing (and a number of books I enjoy) as intentional stylistic features.

"It's my style" is no excuse for bad writing.

edited 12th Oct '14 4:56:23 AM by Tungsten74

The way I see it, good writing is about recognizing the effects of all the choices you can make while writing, and then using that knowledge to make the choices that best serve your intentions. Rules and conventions exist because they serve the intentions of most works. If someone writes badly because they fail to adhere to appropriate rules (as many people do) then, yes, 'it's my style' is not an excuse. But there's also a whole lot of authors - particularly modernists and post-modernists - who 'write badly' in ways that vastly improve their works.

'Conflict' is a big term that can be defined in a lot of ways. Most of the things I read(/write) don't feature people or factions fighting each other or, in the case of inner conflict, even clearly defined opposing aspects of the psyche, though they do generally feature social interactions and psychological processes that fill the same narrative role as conflict and can arguably be labelled as such. Even so, I think it's theoretically possible to write a perfectly good work with no conflict whatsoever. Like, say, a brilliant cohesive exploration of a single state of mind. As for seeing the end coming, that's really only relevant in works that rely on some form of suspense.

Tight pacing in a work is vital to keep the reader hooked and to keep the work flowing seamlessly. Which is why intentionally wonky pacing can be used to create a surreal atmosphere or enforce themes of ennui. And things 'of importance to the plot' don't necessarily need to occur at all in works that are not plot-driven. Which of course is not to say that 'plot-driven' and 'tightly paced' are synonymous; it's perfectly possible to play with the pacing successfully in a plot-driven work, just as it's possible to wrote a well-flowing work where nothing ever really happens.

A bland main character - as any bland aspect of a work - deprives the work of some potential for interest (tautology ho!) and is therefore generally bad, but the blandness may serve a purpose that makes up for it. The character may be an audience surrogate or a straight man, where more personality would distract the reader or take the edge off the contrast. Or the blandness could be part of a theme that the work does a good job of exploring.

A character with no motivation or stake in the plot's (assuming there is one) outcome will have a hard time driving the story forward, but their role as an impartial observer might serve as a great POV for the narration. Such characters are likely to come across as unrealistic, but in certain context this could, much like odd pacing, strengthen themes of unreality or ennui. Or it could be a good way to write a character suffering from depression.

A main character who keeps getting bossed around by other characters is probably bad if you want a hero to root for, but that's not the only type of protagonist. If you have a morally ambiguous story with multiple factions and only want one POV character, a pinball protagonist can be a good way to get an inside look at all of them. If you have a story where the audience is supposed to pity or loathe rather than cheer for the main character, having the character take control of their life might be counterproductive. Oh, and this trope, like everything, can be used to explore themes. Submission, hierarchies and apathy are some that spring to mind.

Pardon the wall of text. I'm guessing you wouldn't enjoy the stuff I read (or write), and I probably wouldn't enjoy yours, and that's fine. People have different taste. But to claim that my writing is bad because of the tools I use - rather than how I use them - strikes me as awfully presumptuous. Tropes Are Tools, yo.

I've said this before elsewhere, but a boring story is one in which the central conflict is either nonexistent or not worthy of the audience's attention. Of course this will vary from audience to audience, but a good writer will be perceptive enough to calculate conflicts that actually put something at stake for the characters as opposed to conflicts that are only artificially important. Again, this is subjective and delivery and execution are often more important than conceptualization and world establishing.

Better Than It Sounds, I'd hazard to say, a very important trope for writers. You can write a bad story about an epic interstellar war between desperate rebels and an empire that rules its people with an iron fist. You can write a good story about a woman who just really likes fashion and shopping a lot. It comes down to how you convey those issues, themes and objectives. By default, I'm more interested in the former story than the latter, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada, and I thought Michael Bay's Transformer movies were crap - or a very guilty pleasure at best.

Some people around here and abroad really hate Author Tract tropes and Aesop tropes, but I actually don't mind subtle or even transparent messages being conveyed through a narrative as long as the message is consistent with the plot, characters and setting. Don't tell me a story about how revenge is bad or how it's okay to take extreme yet heroic measures to save your loved ones when your character is breaking dozens of laws and amassing a tremendous body count...unless you are being subversive so as to prove a point. Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners did an excellent job of turning revenge and angry-dad tropes on their head. The central message and the delivery of that message were handled expertly.

I also believe that boring stories are ones where the author clearly assumes that the Viewers Are Morons. Writing, like any other art form, doesn't have to be high-brow, super-intellectual treatises on the nature of man, and pandering is not inherently bad. However, do not use low intellectual expectations as an excuse to churn out crap. This isn't some law I'm decreeing, but it is a pet peeve of mine. To give you another example, I really didn't like the Transformer movies, but I really enjoyed Pain & Gain. Both films were made by a director who is notorious for making popcorn lowest-common-denominator explosion fests. One film is surprisingly intelligent and insightful. The others...not so much.

edited 14th Oct '14 2:28:51 PM by Aprilla

Seconding the Viewers Are Morons notion. There's nothing more infuriating than a story that treats an audience with the respect of the average wombat. Though speaking personally, I'd take it a step further; pandering is an issue, yes, but what really gets to me is when it becomes blatantly obvious that a story is just going through the motions. Not putting in the work. Taking shortcuts.

I've always thought that any given audience is smarter than creators could ever anticipate (and it doesn't help that there will ALWAYS be more viewers than there are makers). By this point in history, there have been enough stories for people to know what's good and what's bad — and a story is more likely to go bad when the creator(s) refuse to follow through on plot threads, thoughtful progression — for the tale, the characters, what have you — or just plain showing any effort.

People can get surprising amounts of depth from the most unlikely of sources, precisely because the good, interesting sources are willing to make an effort. But when a story refuses to make that possible — when it coasts on surface-level conventions with no flourishes of its own — then it's got a critical problem. It's boring.

I agree with all of this, but I'd add that if the central conflict affects the protagonist in a nuanced or multilayered way that makes it much more compelling. For example Harry Potter's struggle with Voldemort is in a narrative sense as much about Harry understanding his past and who he is as it's about saving Britain.

Story is conflict. If you set out to write a story without conflict you'll fail because it won't be a story. I expect you can get a great piece of writing, e.g. an atmospheric description of place, or a poem, without conflict. But that's not a story.

Also I think it's worth differentiating pacing with structure. Having a weird, unevenly-structured story can be interesting. But bad pacing is bad pacing. I'd argue that uneven, wonky pacing is simply a writing error.

edited 15th Oct '14 1:23:17 AM by editerguy

What about Slice of Life stories?

I'm guessing you mean in terms of conflict? Well, it's rare for a Slice of Life series to not have a conflict. There's usually some kind of goal the protagonists want to achieve (restoring a once shut-down club, fulfilling your late-grandmother's obligations, raising werewolf children etc.), but sometimes the conflict can be internal as well (knowing oneself, growing out of past trauma, getting into meaningful relationships). Of course, there's the Iyashikei genre for which this isn't true...but that genre is specifically made that way, since the goal is for people to "embrace a calming state of mind", so I don't know how exactly those fit into the discussion.

edited 15th Oct '14 9:14:20 AM by Elfhunter

I see ARIA on the Iyashikei list, and even that has some episodes with distinct conflicts or things that have to be accomplished, two of which are the first (guide a newcomer to Aqua/Mars around Neo-Venezia and get her acquainted) and second (protag is asked by a mysterious little girl to deliver a letter and discovers weird stuff about its destination) episodes of the whole series. There's some other, more straight conflicts later on such as finding a protagonist's lost cat, training a new gondolier, getting someone to be more outgoing, solving a mystery at the Carnevale, and one that even ends with someone's life being saved.

x4 That statement just motivated me to spend a couple hours translating an old short story of mine into English so I could put it online. So thanks!

So, would you say this (scroll down to the dashed lines) counts as a story? If it doesn't, what would you define it as instead? If it does, where is the conflict?

(I'm not claiming it's necessarily a good story, by the way. If you think it's rubbish I won't object. Also, I apologize for the self-promotion. I couldn't think of any other short and freely available example.)

Oh, and you're probably right about pacing and structure.

edited 15th Oct '14 2:07:19 PM by ArtisticPlatypus

Conflict is not necessary. Doug Walker of That Guy With The Glasses likes to talk about fiction where nothing happens. What makes a story boring is if it has no emotion. A sense of humor is a good one.

edited 15th Oct '14 2:02:48 PM by lexicon

Emotions can be conflicts in and of themselves. Some absurdist and minimalist comedies have explored very simple themes. I can't remember the name of the play, but it's basically a two-actor play where one of them is just upset because they're out of peanut butter. And it works wonderfully.

I'm not saying that Doug Walker is a total swine who doesn't have an eye for good writing and good storytelling at all, but his analyses tend to be weak and off-base, and he doesn't seem to understand the creative process very well. Walker's got a bit of a problem in figuring out why and how conflicts work the way they do in stories, and some people take the "nothing happens" narrative concept too literally. Seinfeld is famously called the show about about nothing, but it isn't literally about nothing. Every single episode has some sort of central conflict, and the trivial nature of those conflicts is what sustains the comedic atmosphere.

I like some of Walker's ideas and comments, but he's not a very reliable voice for creative writing mechanics.

edited 15th Oct '14 2:39:06 PM by Aprilla

I have read and like every comment .

I have to agree Doug is an excellent comedian, but not very good at analyzing. You can tell he takes a lot of what he says from his cinema classes at school.

I am no a fan of twilight for instance, but his take on twilight seemed to me more based to please the audience than anything

x4 In your story I think the conflict is mostly set up in the first paragraph - the protagonist wants to cheer herself up or to get a sense of satisfaction. She's not sure her idea will work, though. Essentially, an internal conflict. I like the mood you set up, by the way.

All the Iyashikei anime stuff I've watched, admittedly not that much, has conflict on some level. An episode without a conflict wouldn't have a story.

Conflict in a story really can be any kind whatsoever (difficulty cooking, the sudden out-of-place appearance of a talking cat in a classroom, grappling with a hit of nostalgia). As long as it's interesting to the reader.

edited 15th Oct '14 7:19:42 PM by editerguy

Doug is right about The Cosby Show. Half the time there isn't a conflict to be solved like in s1e22 "The Slumber Party" where Cliff entertains the little kids. Doug himself said that every single episode of Seinfeld has some sort of central conflict, though they are trivial.

I didn't actually mean to make this about Doug Walker. I just meant that you can have an interesting story without a problem as long as it has feeling like humor.

Entertaining little kids didn't involve conflict? Those must have been some unnaturally docile kids From what I've seen of The Cosby Show, every episode has some sort of conflict, every episode focuses on a complication the characters have to deal with or the characters trying to reach some goal.

edited 15th Oct '14 7:37:51 PM by editerguy