Being Boring

Greetings from the 12th floor, for the moment relocated to the mountains of western Maryland, where we have doffed our “Why is it so cold in May?” hoodies in favor of “Why is it so hot in June?” t-shirts.

I doubt we’ll ever have another proper spring in my lifetime. I should have enjoyed them more while we had them.

WIP News
As I wrote last month, I broke through a creative clog on the novel-in-progress and got quite a few chapters done. I only finished 2 chapters in April but rebounded in May with a solid 5. I’m still a little behind where I wanted to be, but I made good forward progress. Now that I’ve worked through the trouble spot and fixed it (for now), I feel more comfortable going into some detail about what wasn’t working and what I did to get back on track.

The problem: I had a big action sequence that felt flat. I was struggling to finish these few short chapters and realized I was bored. Stuff happened - Stabbings! Fire! - but…I didn’t really care. And if the writer isn’t interested in what’s happening on the page, there’s a good chance the reader won’t be either. But I couldn’t figure out why. I mean…who doesn’t love stabbings and fire??

The analysis: I read through the earlier chapters - about the first quarter of the novel - to see if this is actually where the protagonist needed to be. Did his choice of action make sense? Was there an alternative that would work better? Had I built up to this section or did it jump out nowhere? Should this set piece be pushed to later in the novel?

By the time I read up to the trouble spots, I felt strongly that I was in the right place. This was a logical, though reckless, action for the protagonist to take. I had built to it and it had to happen now, not in his future. That was positive, but still didn’t answer my question. Why was I bored?

The answer: The set piece didn’t adequately move the story forward. Stuff happened but none of it changed the story’s trajectory. The sequence intentionally sets up a false victory - the protagonist’s plan is reasonably successful, but in the next chapter there’s a turnaround. He won the battle, but lost the war. The turnaround is necessary to push the protagonist to try something else, but it was also undermining the previous few chapters, because they didn’t matter. Essentially, the protagonist was back to square one. That’s fine for a character arc, not so great for the story. The protagonist could have outsourced the entire segment without affecting the plot.

The solution: This section had conflict and obstacles but no turning points. My solution was to force the protagonist to take actions he did not plan or want to take. The set piece already included a confrontation with allies, but the conflict essentially ended in a draw. In the revised version, the protagonist reveals information he intended to keep secret, to win back his allies’ trust. Some additional antagonist conflict raised the tension in the last chapter and forced the protagonist to call for assistance from a dangerous source.

The first bit needed only a few sentences of dialogue to reveal the secret. The second bit lasted about half a chapter but replaced other story business that would have been necessary absent the call for aid. Not for nothing, I also dreaded writing that latter part, so finding a better solution was a huge relief.

The result: The protagonist revealed information to people who shouldn’t know it and owes a major debt to some scary people, two choices that will come back to haunt him. The action sequences move the story forward with unexpected turning points, even though the protagonist ultimately does not get what he wanted out of this scene. The most gratifying part is that I expected both those turns to happen anyway, so I only needed to pull them forward. They work here organically and I no longer need to figure out when and why to drop them later.

The takeaway: Story is more than stuff happening. I knew that already but it’s also a great learning experience to encounter the problem in progress and figure out how to fix it. Also, listen to your gut. If you sense trouble, do your homework and figure it out.

Finally, a personal trick: I have found that the solution to a story problem can often be found within the story itself. As I write, I tend to drop acorns - bits of setting, world building, or characterization - and generally don’t plan to come back to them. This is often something as simple as a character quirk or contradiction, an object in the background, a tangential character mentioned by name. But sometimes, as here, those tidbits are useful. You just need to find them. This also adds cohesion to your story. Your story world feels lived in and you waste less information.

Ninety percent of those details will stay in the background, a bit of spice in the meal, but when one becomes a main ingredient, the aha moment is quite satisfying. In this case, I did plan to return to these specific details, but I expected to do that much later and hadn’t yet figured out what to do with them. Sometimes, however, the discovery is insanely random and it’s delightful.

Also in this letter:

• Posts from May 2026

• WIP News

• Writing Advice

• A Parting Song

Monthly Posts
Last month, I shared why I write and why I write what I write, and suggested this consideration might be important for anyone interested in pursuing creative work. I celebrated continuous learning and looked up my literary family tree.

Root Causes
Continuous
Creative Family Tree

Book Club
I also wrapped up my series discussing writing topics presented in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which still holds up 30-years later, despite her incomprehensible references to publishing advances, index cards, and using the telephone as a telephone.

Bird by Bird: Writer’s Block
Bird by Bird: Voice
Bird by Bird: Giving and Gifts

Writing Advice
I follow about 30 blogs sharing writing advice and bookmark the good stuff. Here are some of the best posts from May:

• “Showing or Telling? How to Decide Based on Line Level, Scene Level, and Story Level” - Tiffany Yates Martin, Jane Friedman

• “Your Voice Is the Point. Stop Toning It Down” - Jenn Windrow, Writers in the Storm

• “The Moral Escalator: Making Goodness the Main Action of a Story” - Regina Linke, Writer’s Digest

• “The Reader-Writer Curve: What’s Actually on the Page vs. What’s in Your Head” - Seth Harwood

• “The Art of Withholding Information” - Kathryn Craft, Writers Helping Writers

A Parting Song
For those of us who prefer our rainbows to have a darker shade, I present the following video, created by Rick Worley, the cartoonist who created the black & white author drawing that graces the top of most of my social media. Rick is also a talented documentary videographer, whose most popular videos provide deep-dive analyses of the Star Wars filmography. You can find him on YouTube.

The video blends a moody New Wave pop song with clips from films that combined gay camp and horror violence. Those of keen ear may recognize the original version of the song from a key moment in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs.

YouTube has flagged the video as age-restricted due to its horror film content, but it’s worth the watch if you’re not too squeamish.

PS - If you’d like to hear the original version by Q Lazzarus, it’s available on Spotify. Q Lazzarus was a criminally overlooked musician whose by-chance encounter with director Jonathan Demme led to her music being featured in his films Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs, and Philadelphia. In a just world, the original version of “Goodbye Horses” would have been an MTV staple in its 1980s heyday.