Help me be less boring

December 15, 2019 1:00 PM

I feel the irresistible impulse to write about my life, but because I don't seem to have learned very much from life, nor have I any profound ideas to share, my writing is boring.

I have read many books about writing, especially memoir writing. I know the expectations of the genre. I know the basic mechanics of writing and plot, characterization, theme, etc. I'm great at helping other people improve their memoir writing, but for some reason I can't improve my own.

I have been trying to figure out why, and I think the problem is that I don't have any life lessons or universal themes for the reader. I'm not quite sure why I feel such a compulsion to write, when I essentially have nothing to say, but I do, and I am not happy with the idea of just writing for myself. I want to communicate with the world! But I need something to tell them, first.

What have you learned from your life experience? How would you communicate that in a personal narrative? Most importantly, how does the process of extracting meaning from experience work? Maybe there's something I'm not doing.

posted by all the light we cannot see to Writing & Language (21 answers total)

I don't read a lot of memoirs but I do read a lot of fiction. Some of my favorite fiction (and films) have been about people's lives that don't have any grand statement or message and just find poignance in living a very regular life. So maybe focus less on trying to find "life lessons" and find instead the pleasures (and pains) of the quotidian? They also paint a picture of what life was like during those specific periods of time in those specific places, so they're building not only a personal picture but also a historical one.

Stoner, Elena Ferrante novels, and the film Paterson are the ones that immediately come to mind that did this well.
posted by thebots at 1:36 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

This semester, I've been in a class doing participant-observation (aka hanging out and seeing what you find), and the thing that has jumped out at me is how interesting every social setting is when you look at it closely. What is it about your life that you take for granted that others from a different part of your country, a different social standing, a different time, a different ---- would not have seen? Tell your reader about your daily hopes, frustrations, monotonies. Things like the wallpaper, the sky, and the smile of the person where you buy your groceries could be riveting with rich description.
posted by past unusual at 1:41 PM on December 15, 2019 [6 favorites]

Is your name Marcel Proust? I thought not.

It's not uncommon for English majors to graduate thinking "I know how to write, but do I have anything to say?" Probably they do, but it's so internalized into their belief system that it doesn't seem clever or interesting.

I think it may be time to pick a form other than memoir. For example, an essay is more explicit in requiring the framing of a question and analysis of evidence.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:45 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

As a writer, I'll answer what my writer's mind considered while reading your question.

1. Start writing. Planning, considering, wondering, worrying, etc. are distractions from writing. They have their place but not right now. That you have the desire to write is your 'go' signal.

2. Begin with this very experience: Posting a question to a hive conglomerate. Meaning, start your piece with this event and then simply write forward from that. What some of the responses elicited, etc.

3. Let go of the notion of a category. Memoir, essay, report, diary entry, blog entry, fictional narrative -- that can be defined after you finish the project.
posted by zenpop at 2:04 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think you should keep writing. It might be boring at first. I usually only discover what I am trying to say after a few tries of writing it. At first, I just have a sort of an instinct that there is something "there," and I can't necessarily explain it. The writing process is how I explore that instinct, how I loosen up my mind and let new ideas come out.
posted by mai at 2:20 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I thought the same as you when I was in my 20s and I couldn't write poetry/stories to my liking. I hadn't lived enough/met enough people with unique experiences to create authentic characters or even write my own story. The truth of the matter is, it doesn't work like that. Going about life trying to experience it and others simply to extract ideas for writing means you'll always have shallow experiences and perceptions. One of my favorite authors, Tove Jansson of Moomin fame, derived most of her characters from people she experienced very intimately over time starting with childhood. You just have to live as much as possible as a person, getting wrapped up in time, and that means all of the joy and pain, the beautiful and the ugly, that comes with it and knowing others. There is a reason several acclaimed writers didn't really get their footing until their mid 30s or 40s or what have you and were otherwise just normal folks that got chewed up by life. But they had quite a bit to say in the end about themselves and others.

The more we interact with others naturally the more we learn their fears, their loves, their motivations, etc. etc. And via that we being to understand our own because, as humans, we're basically creatures that evolved to understand ourselves via our relations to others. But it also means the more likely we are to be emotionally battered and bruised and changed in ways that we may not anticipate as creatives. You have to be willing to let go and let that happen. And that may mean not writing anything meaningful for a long, long time.
posted by Young Kullervo at 2:30 PM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?

Everyone

Because no one is obliged to read them.

In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman. It is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so.

(Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts)

Preserve me from memoir-writers who want to teach me 'life lessons'. I don't want to be taught life lessons, I just want to enter into the inwardness of someone else's life. The challenge is not to find something interesting: you don't need to find it, because you already have it. As Herzen says, 'every life is interesting'. The challenge is to make it interesting to the reader.
posted by verstegan at 2:48 PM on December 15, 2019 [14 favorites]

A whole book is a big place to start. Do you have a single life event that you could write an interesting story about? A series of essays can be just as compelling a way to frame your life.
posted by tchemgrrl at 2:56 PM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

You could start a project and write about that. Year of Reading Dangerously, Year of Yes, that kind of thing.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:19 PM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

Instead of writing your memoir like a novel, why not write it like a series of short stories...think Me Talk Pretty One Day? That way you can pick and choose from moments in your life or anecdotes without it having to have some overall arc.
posted by Jubey at 3:21 PM on December 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

This reads to me like the beginning of a funny book: "I feel the irresistible impulse to write about my life, but because I don't seem to have learned very much from life, nor have I any profound ideas to share, [I must warn that this book will be] boring."
posted by slidell at 5:08 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

You can't push interestingness. You can only pull it, via curiosity. Curiosity makes you interesting, makes the world interesting, makes everything interesting. Your own boredom concerns suck the life out of everything. It's kryptonite for interestingness. In this realm, cause/effect are all muddled up.

I'm old, and have been insatiably curious my entire life (and am still). I'm told I'm very interesting, yet I still have little self-awareness of this. I don't push interestingness, I pull it with my curiosity.

I expect this suggestion to strike you as tantalizingly non-useful. That's because you're engaged in a campaign of pushing something, and I'm not adding on to that cause. If you'll surrender that impossible campaign and flip your perspective, it won't be a thing you'll ever need to think of again.

Tl;dr: Interesting people don't try to be interesting. That's the exclusive province of the boring. How do you become interesting? Curiosity!
posted by Quisp Lover at 5:45 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Work on conveying emotion. My favorite prose excerpt is from near the end of Anna Karenina, when Levin is working in a field with some peasants. It’s pretty quotidian action, but it leads to an emotional revelation, and the way Tolstoy describes it is exhilarating. Think about a time where you felt something intensely, and then try to make the reader feel that.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:05 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Show, don't tell.
posted by athirstforsalt at 8:21 PM on December 15, 2019

We're all interesting when we don't hide.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:37 AM on December 16, 2019 [5 favorites]

If you are invested in finding a sort of transformative meaning to a story, it may be helpful to participate in a story telling workshop, a la The Moth - I took a workshop with MassMouth and found it helpful in this context. There are probably local groups near you that do something similar!
posted by ChuraChura at 7:37 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

Can you start a daily practice of journaling, 3 pages first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening? It's real work to turn the unrefined noise of daily experience into something that has meaning and interest and journaling will help you do that - will help you discover what's most interesting to you, discover what happens when you think more deeply and intensely about something that happened to you that day (and connect it up with other memories, ideas, things you care about). Don't think of it as writing for yourself; think of it as the necessary preparatory work for writing something that will connect in a more compelling way to others.
posted by Jeanne at 7:46 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm not a writer. But, "say yes to all scary things" is worked well for me when it comes to the title question. "Lessons" are far less engaging than "interesting and unexpected," at least to me as a reader. Best of luck!
posted by eotvos at 8:17 AM on December 16, 2019

Here's something I noticed about this thread. You explicitly ask three questions ("What have you learned from your life experience? How would you communicate that in a personal narrative? Most importantly, how does the process of extracting meaning from experience work?") Yet many people have instinctively answered different questions than you asked. That's totally understable-- it's human nature to respond to the way you've framed those questions, rather than the literal content of the questions themselves.

There's an interesting implication there. It's not just "life lessons" and "profound ideas" that become richer and more complex when you put them in a narrative context. It is questions as well. Even if you don't have answers to provide in your memoir, you might still be able to raise interesting questions. Are there things in your life that you don't understand? Times where you don't know why you behaved in a certain way? Choices you've made whose wisdom or kindness you doubt?

If so, your very uncertainty is a type of meaning, and fertile subject for literature.

In my case, the process of extracting meaning from experience tends to involve a lot more questions than answers. Some questions I might ask myself:
• What events stand out in my mind as particularly significant? What do those events have in common?
• How have I changed gradually over the course of my life?
• Were there moments when I changed suddenly? If so, what caused it?
• What decisions have I regretted? Is there a common theme to those regrets?
• What do I know that other people might not?
• What lessons have I learned that other people seemed to learn faster?
posted by yankeefog at 9:47 AM on December 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

yankeefog makes a good point about skipping over your questions. To address the question "Most importantly, how does the process of extracting meaning from experience work?", research in the area of narrative theory has outlined four kinds of structure:

1. Temporal coherence - ordering events from a life in temporal order
2. Autobiographical coherence - situating events in an expected biographical order (this is dependent on the social context; for example, different cultures have different expectations about when someone might move out of their parents' home, or even if they move out)
3. Causal coherence - linking disparate events to understand outcomes (thing 1 and 2 cause thing 3 to happen, such as I studied hard and got good grades in school, therefore I was able to secure a good job after I graduated)
4. Thematic coherence - selecting what might otherwise be unrelated events in order to support a lens of understanding of these events (here are all the examples of times that I was forgetful; times I underwent hardship showing the difficulty of my life; or times I overcame hardship thereby showing my determination)

Incidentally, these 4 structures are listed in the order that we develop the cognitive ability to use them. Temporal coherence, we often start being able to do as a small child, autobiographical as a child into a teenager, causal coherence in teenage to early 20s, and thematic coherence starts to gel anywhere in the 20s to mid-30s for most people.

If you're interested in more on this, I was summarizing from this article:
Bluck, S., & Habermas, T. (2000). The life story schema. Motivation and Emotion, 24(2), 122-147.
posted by past unusual at 8:27 PM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Just an update to let you know that I've pretty much found the advice I was looking for in Phillip Lopate's To Show and To Tell.

Lopate's advice contradicts that of most how-to-write-memoir books. He says that sometimes telling is better than showing, and outlines his reasons why (too long to get into here, but I found them persuasive). He also addresses the problem of developing a theme and being relatable to the reader in a fresh and original way. I highly recommend this book for anyone else who might be struggling with thematic concerns, or how to elevate their journal entries into a narrative that would interest other people.
posted by all the light we cannot see at 9:31 PM on January 15, 2020 [1 favorite]