Not all authors are tailored for you 

Considering my poor luck with novels lately, I was tempted to talk about the best tips for skipping the boring parts in potentially great stories.

This is where some authors lose me. Every Wheel of Time fanatic keeps assuring me that Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series is worth reading. But they also admit that it becomes a slog in the middle and you have to push through several boring books to reach the good stuff.

I thought it would be helpful if we talked about the most effective methods of skimming the dull parts of excellent novels without missing vital information. But then, I disagree with that entire philosophy. If a book expects you to crawl through several chapters of sleep-inducing nonsense, you should drop it. Life is too short to sit through stories you have stopped enjoying.

So, I decided to approach this topic from the writing side. Some of you are budding authors dreaming about a future in publishing. You are probably planning on penning a few chapters in the coming weeks and months, or maybe you already have a draft on your hands, but are worried about writing the kinds of achingly tedious chapters you normally skim.

I’m not entirely clueless about authoring books; I have one 900-page manuscript already written. I’m also 300 pages deep
into a second novel, but until my editor completes her work and I publish what I have written, I won’t know if I have the talent for storytelling.

So, analyzing this issue strictly as a reader, how do you skip the boring bits in a novel? Strangely enough, I don’t know. Every writing expert mentions this quote from Elmore Leonard (3:10 To Yuma, Justified): ‘Try to leave out all the parts readers skip.’ That sounds like sound advice. But what does that even mean?

Technically speaking, you can’t skip the boring parts. Too much of whatever you like becomes tedious after a while. You can’t read 500 pages of nonstop action, drama, or romance. Every novel requires quieter moments during which your characters can recover and reflect on their actions.

Additionally, the mundane elements some authors downplay are vital because they create ample opportunities for character development. For instance, characters we just met can use a cooking session to show audiences who they are. Those hours of walking, hunting, and camping in fantasy fiction provide firsthand information about a hero’s personality.

You will watch them talk, eat, sleep, argue, fight, until you learn to love them. You can’t provide layered character exploration without the boring bits. However, according to experienced authors like Elmore, every scene in your story must move the story forward in some way, which creates a challenge.

One article I read praised Alexandre Dumas for guiding his characters through a daring escape from an exploding ship in The Three Musketeers, and then covering their hours at sea within a few paragraphs.

The article argued that milking the drama of that incident by chronicling the characters’ harrowing experiences at sea, the hunger they had to overcome, and the waves that threatened to drown them, would have repelled audiences who wanted them to return to the action in France as soon as possible.

But I know fantasy fiction readers who live for that drama. They want to sit with the heroine as she sews a shirt in a romance novel. They want to know how the farmer feeds his cows. Many editors will cut those components because they don’t explicitly move the story forward, and yet, that is the detailed storytelling to which some readers gravitate.

So, how do you skip the boring bits? You don’t. Identify your audience and write for them. Give them what they want. Don’t alter your approach to appeal to readers who don’t appreciate your style.

katmic200@gmail.com