Have you ever tried to induce boredom through your work?

If a work is found to be boring then it is usually a fault of the creator.

But I wonder how does one deliberately attempt to make a work boring?

It quite easy to induce disgust and disdain as I still remember the name, Howard Stern.

The path seems to be razor thin. It must be unengaging, but too unengaging or else the reader/viewer/listener/player would find something else to enjoy.

EDIT:

What works more or less uses "boring and uninteresting" as a selling point?

edited 14th Dec '14 5:33:56 PM by Worlder

I don't think I've ever encountered this in a way that wasn't really meant to induce laughter - done for comedic purposes.

Ex. I remember a passage in Snow Crash that was a lengthy office memo about the sharing and use of toilet paper in the office - about the rationing of toilet paper in what was left of an American government office. It was written in a dry, boring manner, as it was meant to be a common beareacracy kind of thing that every cubicle-jockey has seen before, but it was HILARIOUS because of how, well, "anal" the office was getting about tp.

Also the whole "our product sucks" trope with advertising - actually TRYING to be boring usually has the alterior motive of being funny.

Ok yeah that's more like what i'm going for except that do it too well and people won't pick up on the joke.

edited 14th Dec '14 7:40:50 PM by Worlder

• Verbose descriptions of every single character, object, and setting that does not scale with relevance
• Dialogue that includes every random tidbit of conversations
• Drawn out filler scenes
• Prose that aims for quantity over quality; using large words that don't quite fit and not bothering to be creative with language use
• Simple grammar; overuse of passive voice and forms of "to be"; repetitive, redundant sentences

Things that are boring to read tend to be boring to write + vice versa. I don't know why one would want to purposely invoke bad writing as a "selling point".

Induced boredom can be a great tool for making the object you're describing to come off as boring too. For example, the best way to make a character's work seem uninteresting is to describe it in such excruciating detail that the reader starts to be bored too.

I agree with Thelostcup in that I wouldn't go as far as saying that you can use induced boredom as a selling point, rather it's a tool for making something in contrast seem more interesting.

edited 15th Dec '14 11:11:28 AM by Paradisesnake

I haven't seen it done (but its not a genre I read a lot) but it would be an interesting way of getting an important clue past the reader in a mystery plot. Literally bury the information in Beige Prose / a Wall of Text.