BORING!!!

The KPF: an objective formula for telling whether a story is slow

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Whenever someone grimaces that a film or novel or insert other work of narrative art is too slow, we ought to ask: Compared to what? And: Is your evaluative judgement of it being too slow actually a wires-crossed descriptive statement about its purposed slowness? Look at music (or listen to it), where the allegro and adagio movements are spelt out — wouldn’t it be wrong-headed to criticise the slow movements for being slow?[1]

What people usually mean, then, by too slow is boring, and what they mean by boring is that they felt bored. The real question is, what does it mean to say a play, short story, novel etc. bored you?

• That it’s the opposite of what Henry James in The Art of Fiction wrote was the “only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel,” which is, “that it be interesting.” I’ve come to distrust, as much as I do the comparably baggy-scoped ‘problematic’, that old vaguery ‘interesting’, which means anything from ‘the next Finnegans Wake’ to ‘a smidge different from daytime TV’. It’s ‘interesting’ in this sense that Danilo Kiš’s short story ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’ repeats with many many variations its opening paragraph; that doesn’t mean…