We Can Be Interesting Writers Too
By: Rambling Rose
Tags: Inspiration, Writing Tips, Writing, Personal Development, Writers Block

We Can Be Interesting Writers Too

Photo by Alejandro Benėt on Unsplash

Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion. But, yet again, things would be pretty boring if everyone agreed with one another now, wouldn’t they?

The question “will your writing be boring if your life isn’t interesting?” is one that until today seems to have been answered incredibly well for us all. And as much as I agree that a life of abundance makes for an abundance of life within the words we writers document, I also believe that the side of the coin that currently embraces the floor has something equal to offer.

In the now echoed words of Tim Denning and Isaiah McCall:

“A writer is only as interesting as his [their] life.”

Feel free to call this piece of writing uninteresting because of this re-hashed quote alone. I’m at a time in my life where the metaphoric cardboard straws I am clutching at are soggy from someone else’s milkshake. But I’m doing my best. And writing about this subject holds great value to me.

Spellbinders are powerful speakers who captivate audiences with tales of life oftentimes beyond the wildest of imaginations. To achieve this within our writing, do we need to fill our lives with interesting experiences to base it on? Short answer: no. Let me show you why.

Writing in a time without color

Well, let’s not be too dramatic. There was color in the world at the start of 2020 but there might as well hadn't been.

“Variety’s the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour.” — William Cowper

As much truth is held within this quote, I have found there to be safety in routine and getting what we come to expect from people — without it sounding repetitive. Because that would just grate.

There’s a difference between your writing sucking and your writing being boring. If you catch yourself before hitting publish noticing fatal writing errors, then you know what work you need to do. If you re-read for the 17th time and think the content is boring, that doesn’t mean your life is boring — it just means your style is. Your life doesn’t need to be boring for your writing to bore people. Even those of us with stereotypically exciting lives can get complacent with what they have. And just maybe this attitude might reflect in that which they choose to write. Those once captivating looking glasses for others to gather glimpses of their incredible lives become sullied in the same “this is what I did today” sort of structure that leaves audiences wondering why they bothered reading in the first place.

I for one often discover that when nothing interesting is happening in my external life, my internal life thrives. I’m able to be calm and present within myself, block out the noise and distraction, and listen to the silence. The nothingness. It’s there that I can take a private trip to the realm of “what if”, beyond the confines around me, and find the joy, the excitement, the vigor of life that I have been lacking… and then write it all out.

Our lives don’t need to be full of double rainbows and naked skydiving in order to become interesting: our imaginations can do that for us.

Don’t wait for inspiration

Think of this past year. Remember how you sat indoors at your desk. Heart racing as fast as your mind. Trying to keep your level head afloat amongst all the uncertainty, let alone even thinking about what you’re going to write next. The key is to write even when you are lacking in inspiration.

Author Brenda Ueland teaches that each one of us is talented and has something original to say. It comes out when one writes simply and freely without waiting for inspiration:

I learned that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor it is kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and everyday give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child singing beads in kindergarten, — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. — Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

I’m not going to be the one to tell you what I think counts as boring and interesting things to write about. That is entirely up to the writer and what their particular audience desires. But I will say that there is a particular formula to follow should you ever start doubting your ability to be a remarkable writer: Perseverance + Imagination = Improvement

Many authors lived seemingly boring lives

If you think an author’s life is as interesting and fulfilled as the characters they write in their stories, think again.

Stephen King did anything he could to earn money while writing and submitting short stories. Including working as a janitor, a gas pump attendant, and at an industrial laundry facility. The book “Carrie” was even inspired whilst he was scrubbing rust stains from a girl’s shower room.

Franz Kafka was employed as an Insurance Clerk by the Prague Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute shortly after law school. Across 14 years he proved himself an asset and rose the ranks, eventually becoming Senior Secretary of the Institute. During this time he produced a series of works, including his most famous: “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”), which was first printed in October 1915.

Charles Dickens was made to work at a boot-blacking factory at the extremely young age of 12 by his family to help aid them financially. There, for the payment of six shillings per week, he stuck labels on pots of shoe polish for 10 hours each day. He would later use that grim experience in his novels, which often focused on social and financial inequality in England.

The mere fact the lives these authors lived were dull and rooted in the “real world” actually helped them achieve remarkable things with the subject matter. Life doesn’t need to be interesting for our writing to be. At least, not in the traditional sense.

Being boring is sexy

Here are three things I think you’ll find interesting about American poet and critic, Kenneth Goldsmith:

He has never abided by the constraints of poetry from the literary sense.

“I guess what I write is poetry. But I clearly don’t write traditional poems. I’ve never written a sonnet. Poetry is so generous that it can take a hybrid practice like mine and claim it as its own and support it in a way fiction isn’t able to.” — Kenneth Goldsmith

2. He was appointed MoMA’s first poet laureate in 2013.

3. He openly calls himself a boring writer.

Goldsmith once undertook the writing exercise of retyping a day’s copy of the New York Times and then published it as a 900-page book, entitled Day. He would take a page of the newspaper, start at the upper left-hand corner and work his way through, following the articles as they were laid out on the page. Despite sounding incredibly boring, for him, it was the most fascinating writing process he ever experienced, going as far as calling it “sexy”:

“I was trained as a sculptor and moving the text from one place to another became as physical, and as sexy as, say, carving stone.” — Kenneth Goldsmith

One thing he openly urges people not to do, however, is actually read it. He thinks it would be boring indeed. But in having awareness of the story and his reasoning behind it, the writing now becomes more of a conceptual art piece, rather than just another dense book of content. And the events of Day that may have been deemed boring at the time of publishing, can be looked back on and remembered with thanks to Goldsmith’s decision to immortalize it in a book. Despite labeling himself as a so-called “boring writer”.

Goldsmith is proof that sometimes in writing, excitement — like beauty — is in the eye of the beholder: the person who set the brief. Trust in your style of writing. Be intuitive while making sure your grammar, punctuation and literary devices continue to grow and wrap their vines around this everchanging digital world. It’s sometimes ok for boring to be your new black.

Not everything is black and white

I’m certainly no literary scholar but I believe Greene was onto something.

“Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.” — Graham Greene

No one has a purely black vs white dichotomy in life. Fat vs. thin. Male vs. female. Large vs. small. All opposites are perceived by us based on what we have each been subjected to in our lifetime.

Everything is relative; everything is subject to grey. And in a world that is constantly merging lines between groups, grey has a very welcome place. Black, white and grey are put in colored pencil boxes for a reason. You can never underestimate a good greyscale sketch every once in a while to cut through all of that dizzying, colorful, creative noise. So too can be said about the presence of writing that is familiar to us (i.e. what has already been “done”). It becomes a testament to writers to be able to deliver content in new, imaginative ways and potentially introduce an entirely new generation to its wonders. So please continue to educate, influence and inspire.

Final thoughts

I personally believe that there are points of interest to gleam even within writing that might lack that initial pizzazz that garners widespread adoration at first. For the readers who seek value within words, they will undoubtedly find it, no matter how they are presented. Besides, if all writers wrote content as interesting as their lives, we would slowly but surely unlearn how to read.