The reality of life is that much of it is boring. The reality of fiction is that it must keep the reader interested, or the book will be shut—the TV turned off. So how is fiction to depict the fullness of the life? The answer is, it skips most of the boring parts. You never see people using the restroom (unless they’ve just been given a laxative), and you don’t watch people sleeping—unless they’re about to be woken up. I’ve been forced to realize that I spend most of my free time sitting on a couch, staring slack-jawed at the TV. That’s not going to make interesting reading or viewing.
So, fiction skips the boring parts. However, life also contains boring people. You can skip those, too, but it makes for an artificial feel to fiction that is striving for verisimilitude. You can get away with it, if you’re writing a con movie, and all of your main characters are quipping crooks and con artists. Or a movie about politics, where everyone is smart or has strong personalities. But if you’re just trying to write a normal little story about normal people, you can’t have all of them be clever and interesting. Even if it’s simply to be a foil for your interesting main character, someone has got to be boring. So how does fiction demonstrate boring, without actually being boring to its audience?
It makes up “funny” boring. It’s a convention. Just like in bad sitcoms from the ’80s—every time somebody turned off a lamp, the whole set turns blue. And we, as the audience, understand that it’s supposed to be pitch dark and the characters can’t see anything, even though we can see their blue-lit faces quite clearly. A pitch-black screen would be boring to watch, so TV made up the blue-lamp convention of dark. In the same way, to express boring people, there is the convention of “boring” funny.
An example from a forgotten Neil Simon film, The Lonely Guy. Larry (Steve Martin) is the epitome of a lonely guy, and is hanging out with his lonely friend, Warren (Charles Grodin), who is maybe the most boring guy in the universe. He talks to ferns, plays chess with himself, and has a day job sitting in and making conversation with women until their boyfriends show up. And he’s balding. Here’s an example of one of their dialogues:
Warren: You know what gets me? I go to get a haircut, they charge me like 4 bucks. Which is the same amount of money they would charge anybody to come in. But like, say Michael Landon goes into the shop where I go, they would charge him 4 bucks, yet he’s got like a hundred times more hair than I do. By rights, they should be charging Michael Landon like 400 dollars!
Larry: Yeah, but they don’t charge it by how much hair you’ve got; they’re paid to make it look good with what you’ve got.
Warren: Well, I don’t even know if they’ve done that. I mean, how does that look? (Larry grimaces.) See that’s what I’m saying.
Larry: Have you ever tried, maybe like, swooping it over? You know, how some guys they grow their hair real long and then they swoop it over. You can do a lot like that. You can get a pompadour and everything.
Warren: My hair doesn’t grow long enough to swoop it over. Besides, I think when you see a guy with his hair swooped over, you know he’s doing it to cover up something. If a guy has a lot of hair he’s not gonna swoop it over.
Larry: You know the guys who always keep their hair are the guys who have no use for it at all—they’re not trying to impress anybody. Like bums. You ever seen a bald bum? They always have a beautiful head of hair.
Warren: Why is that?
Larry: I think it’s because they never wash it. It’s the only time you ever see your hair fall out is after you take a shower and you wash your hair and there’s a bunch of hair laying there.
Warren: You mean if I’d never washed my hair I’d have a full head of hair?
Larry: Of course they could lose their hair, too, and maybe it just stays in.
Warren: Just locked in there. If they ever washed it, they could be bald bums.
I wish my friends and I had conversations this random. The reality is, it would take some pretty interesting and clever people to have a conversation with this level of outside-the-box thinking. But for the purposes of the movie, this conversation demonstrates how boring the characters are, and why women don’t date them. It’s not actually a boring conversation, but it does the job of showing boring characterization.
The best writers can make you laugh at the kind of person who would drive you nuts in real life. The office worker who talks about nothing but her kids, the jock whose whole identity is football, the nerd who understands computers but not humans—these are people you stay away from socially, but love to watch on TV. Because it’s “funny” boring. The Office has proven that boring, anti-social people can make for great comedy when done right. Look at Kelly Kapoor’s explanation of Netflix:
Kelly: So then the next movie moves to the top of the queue. So number five becomes number four. Number six becomes number five. Number three becomes number two. Etcetera, etcetera. And let’s just say that I just sent back Love, Actually, which was awesome. And they sent me Uptown Girls, which is also awesome. But guess what? Now I want to see Love, Actually again. But it’s at the bottom of the queue! Oh no, what’ll I do? What I do is this. I go online, I go “click, click, click,” and I change the order of the queue so that I can see Love, Actually as soon as I want to. It’s so easy, Ryan. Do you really not know how Netflix works?
Ryan: I guess I forgot.
Kelly: You’re such a ditz.
Kevin: Ryan, well done, two minutes, forty-two seconds. Additionally, Pam, you win ten because she said “awesome” twelve times, and Jim, you win five because she mentioned six romantic comedies.
Or Miss Charlotte Bartlett, from A Room with a View. She is one of the most insufferable and boring characters ever written, and yet Forster makes boringness and exasperation funny:
In spite of the clearest directions, Miss Bartlett contrived to bungle her arrival. She was due at the South-Eastern station at Dorking, whither Mrs. Honeychurch drove to meet her. She arrived at the London and Brighton station, and had to hire a cab up. No one was at home except Freddy and his friend, who had to stop their tennis and to entertain her for a solid hour. Cecil and Lucy turned up at four o’clock, and these, with little Minnie Beebe, made a somewhat lugubrious sextette upon the upper lawn for tea.
”I shall never forgive myself,” said Miss Bartlett, who kept on rising from her seat, and had to be begged by the united company to remain. “I have upset everything. Bursting in on young people! But I insist on paying for my cab up. Grant that, at any rate.”
”Our visitors never do such dreadful things,” said Lucy, while her brother, in whose memory the boiled egg had already grown unsubstantial, exclaimed in irritable tones: “Just what I’ve been trying to convince Cousin Charlotte of, Lucy, for the last half hour.”
”I do not feel myself an ordinary visitor,” said Miss Bartlett, and looked at her frayed glove.
”All right, if you’d really rather. Five shillings, and I gave a bob to the driver.”
Miss Bartlett looked in her purse. Only sovereigns and pennies. Could any one give her change? Freddy had half a quid and his friend had four half-crowns. Miss Bartlett accepted their moneys and then said: “But who am I to give the sovereign to?”
”Let’s leave it all till mother comes back,” suggested Lucy.
”No, dear; your mother may take quite a long drive now that she is not hampered with me. We all have our little foibles, and mine is the prompt settling of accounts.”
Here Freddy’s friend, Mr. Floyd, made the one remark of his that need be quoted: he offered to toss Freddy for Miss Bartlett’s quid. A solution seemed in sight, and even Cecil, who had been ostentatiously drinking his tea at the view, felt the eternal attraction of Chance, and turned round.
But this did not do, either.
”Please—please—I know I am a sad spoilsport, but it would make me wretched. I should practically be robbing the one who lost.”
”Freddy owes me fifteen shillings,” interposed Cecil. “So it will work out right if you give the pound to me.”
”Fifteen shillings,” said Miss Bartlett dubiously. “How is that, Mr. Vyse?”
”Because, don’t you see, Freddy paid your cab. Give me the pound, and we shall avoid this deplorable gambling.”
Miss Bartlett, who was poor at figures, became bewildered and rendered up the sovereign, amidst the suppressed gurgles of the other youths. For a moment Cecil was happy. He was playing at nonsense among his peers. Then he glanced at Lucy, in whose face petty anxieties had marred the smiles. In January he would rescue his Leonardo from this stupefying twaddle.
”But I don’t see that!” exclaimed Minnie Beebe who had narrowly watched the iniquitous transaction. “I don’t see why Mr. Vyse is to have the quid.”
”Because of the fifteen shillings and the five,” they said solemnly. “Fifteen shillings and five shillings make one pound, you see.”
”But I don’t see—”
They tried to stifle her with cake.
”No, thank you. I’m done. I don’t see why—Freddy, don’t poke me. Miss Honeychurch, your brother’s hurting me. Ow! What about Mr. Floyd’s ten shillings? Ow! No, I don’t see and I never shall see why Miss What’s-her-name shouldn’t pay that bob for the driver.”‘
”I had forgotten the driver,” said Miss Bartlett, reddening. “Thank you, dear, for reminding me. A shilling was it? Can any one give me change for half a crown?”
”I’ll get it,” said the young hostess, rising with decision.
”Cecil, give me that sovereign. No, give me up that sovereign. I’ll get Euphemia to change it, and we’ll start the whole thing again from the beginning.”
”Lucy—Lucy—what a nuisance I am!” protested Miss Bartlett, and followed her across the lawn. Lucy tripped ahead, simulating hilarity.
One of the criticisms I have received of my own writing is that all my characters are rather clever and quippy. I recognize that I need to not make everyone sound like a wise-cracking 20-year-old, but have not yet figured out how to lessen their quirks without making them boring. I’ve tried to give characters weird oddities that set them apart from the others, but I have such a fear of writing even a single sentence that can’t, itself, hold interest.
I guess that’s one of the things I’ll be working on in the New Year. And studying the greats to see how they pull it off so well.
