Boring books are all around us. I'm looking at one now, on my floor, and in a few minutes I will pick it up and dedicate myself to read ten pages. When I am finished with the book, in a week or so, I will hold my hands to the sky. I will call on some forgotten god, demand I receive free refills of caffeine and free cream, not the non-dairy stuff but the real cream, and then, once I have had my fill of dark roast bean, I will drive to town, and donate the mind numbing text to my library, the only place in my small community that a politician can't #$%^up because it's on the National Register of Historic Places.

What's you're trick?

Practice your speed reading, but don't backtrack if you miss something or daydream or whatever. It's good exercise to have the words bypass the sloth of internal monologue and go straight to concept.

Interbane wrote:Practice your speed reading, but don't backtrack if you miss something or daydream or whatever. It's good exercise to have the words bypass the sloth of internal monologue and go straight to concept.

Thanks for the advice, Interbane. I'll give it a try.

Well, then I don't read it further. I know it sounds like smart ass answer but that is one of the effective ways to go around it.

If its required reading for a class or something like that, I grit my teeth and bare it, and try to pace myself, something like what you said. X number of pages per day.

Otherwise, I stop reading and that's the end of it. I actually just returned a book to the library that was boring me to tears and so I decided not to waste my time with it.

gesler0811 wrote:If its required reading for a class or something like that, I grit my teeth and bare it, and try to pace myself, something like what you said. X number of pages per day.

Otherwise, I stop reading and that's the end of it. I actually just returned a book to the library that was boring me to tears and so I decided not to waste my time with it.

Well, you could try rushing it too and pretend that you paid attention. That's until someone starts to ask questions about it.

An author has a paragraph to interest me. If he fails, I dump it. But, I'm too old to have to take a test.

The worst sin an author can commit is to get something so factually wrong that I throw the book away. One author had an interesting premise. But in the first three paragraphs the weapon went from a pistol to a revolver to an automatic. I was so stunned I reread the passage. I decided the author was an idiot and stopped there.

Bern Pearson wrote:The worst sin an author can commit is to get something so factually wrong that I throw the book away. One author had an interesting premise. But in the first three paragraphs the weapon went from a pistol to a revolver to an automatic. I was so stunned I reread the passage. I decided the author was an idiot and stopped there.

Years ago I would sometimes pick up an obscure writer's magazine the local Barnes and Noble stocked. This magazine reminded me of a newspaper tabloid it was so cheaply constructed, but it had one thing the expensive, glossy publications on writing didn't. It had guts to tell it how it is. One of the things I remember was reading about writer's not staying focused and screwing up like you mentioned. I no doubt have made the same mistake over the years of my writing, but I hope not often. I'm haunted by the magazine article so much so, that when I write, I'll go back over small details like, "If I take a left on that road would I be going north or south?" I'm not the most detailed writer. I'm part of that fast paced, annoying generation, of should have been a hippy know-it-all, groomed on movies and television beats. Basically, one of those writer's that tick people off who like details, but I at least try to get what details I put in accurate when telling my story, and I'm proud to say that readers have pointed that out. YUP!

I diagram the scene so it makes sense. I have maps of where things are so if the character went north to get there he goes south on the return. I have a diagram of the buildings so the description stays consistent. I frequently map the characters on people I know so they look and act the same. Of course, most are caricatures. The exception being Havelock Pigeon's boss who has AADD. He was my boss exactly. It always amazed us that he could make it to work each day and one day he really did take a screwdriver and remove the covers from a multi-million dollar defense product, thus breaking the seals and voiding the final test that made it a salable item. He wanted to look it over for quality purposes.

Long descriptive passages bore me and I skipped through whole chapters of Tom Clancy's work, even though I knew some of the equipment as someone who had worked on it.

BTW, Brooks127, can you send me a link to something you've written?