(Image by Ekoate Nwaforlor, via Unsplash)
- Axiom 1: Ordinary people make for boring stories.
- Axiom 2: Fortunately, there are no ordinary people.
As I said yesterday, my most recent book is about a plow driver in a rural community of about 800 people. And that’s not a pitch that’s going to immediately lend itself to a Hollywood bidding war. How on earth can anybody go on for 350 pages about a damn truck driver?
Today, we’re going to talk about boring stories, and why sometimes they might not be. But first, let’s investigate this idea of something being boring. Entire television franchises have been built around people who buy storage locker contents at auction. Nascar and IndyCar races are nothing but following that old guy whose left-turn signal has been flashing for three hours. As George Will once said, football is mostly committee meetings. The world is filled with boring things that somehow have drawn broad and enthusiastic attention.
I think that grammar is at fault. Being boring is not an appropriate adjective to describe a thing. Being bored or boring is an appropriate adjective to describe a person’s state. Things are not inherently boring; they have just encountered a recipient for whom there is no appropriately shaped port. Boredom is a state of being disconnected from one’s surroundings. Not pleased by them nor menaced by them nor curious about them, but utterly disconnected. Think of how Charlie Brown’s teacher is portrayed in the animated shows… an offstage muted trumpet playing nonsense tones. What ninth-grader in 1970’s Michigan is going to be attentive to a lesson on the Boxer Rebellion in China, when presented by a teacher on the glide path to retirement? We were a whole room of disconnected cables there…
So indeed, things can be boring to one person and interesting to another simply because of the way we’re shaped. But I don’t want to give way to radical relativism, the idea that one thing’s as good as the next and we can just blame the audience when something doesn’t get their interest. That doesn’t help us strive for quality, it’s just the endless drivel of 480 cable channels.
- Axiom 3: Boring people tell boring stories.
What makes a person boring? A boring person is going to tell you whatever they want to tell you, with no regard at all for whether the listener is engaged. A boring person is only a transmitter, has no interest at all in the status of the receiver. We all know folks who go on endlessly about their grievances or their enthusiasms. I mean, I can tell you the names, jersey numbers, and field positions of every member of the starting lineup for the 1968 Detroit Tigers. Really, I can do that. (Nora calls it brain lint.)
But I won’t. Because I have to assume that it won’t be nearly as interesting to you as it was to me, the ten-year-old Michigander who listened to Ernie Harwell on the radio for every game when the Tigers won the 1968 World Series. There are a few dozen other people in that situation, and if I ever ran into one, we’d have a shared connection. We wouldn’t be bored, because we’d have the appropriate intellectual and emotional cable set.
So I can be aggressively boring by delivering information that I KNOW is of no interest and no value to its listeners. Blah blah blah blah blah.
The philosopher Z.D. Gurevitch says that the dialogue has three components: speaking, listening, and responding. There’s no dialogue if the writer doesn’t write. There’s no dialogue of the reader isn’t reading. And there’s no dialogue if the reader doesn’t think a little differently after having read.
So that’s my effort to not be a boring person. Yes, I initiate the dialogue by writing something. But I hope that I invite dialogue by writing something that might actually help a reader color their thinking just a shade or two.
Let’s talk about that tomorrow.
Herb Childress 