Day 311: Pass Times

Boredom is the mind killer. It’s essential to find ways to keep myself sharp and occupied during the long hours of nothing to do. So far reading fiction has been an effective means of passing the time on my shift when there is nothing work related to accomplish. I’ve tried standard forms of published long form fiction, but when I’m staving off mind breaking boredom I find I develop plot ADD. I’m not going to sit around and read through 100 pages of buildup when I could go for short form highly creative works of fiction.

Take for example Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m sure many people attest that it’s a classical work of fiction that helped define a genre for generations to come. The prose is magnificent and characters so well defined I can practically rip them off the pages.

Nothing happens for the first eighty something pages and I stopped reading. It doesn’t matter if you are the greatest writer in the world. If nothing happens in your story I’m not going to waste my time reading it. I read books for the immersive story, and in order for a story to take my by the throat stuff has to happen in the plot. For fifty pages the accountant is sitting in his castle being scared and paranoid. He observes Dracula turning into a swarm of bats and stumbles through forbidden doorways, but the story is told through the perspective of a character that does little to nothing aside from sitting in room cringing in fear.

On the other hand fanfiction isn’t the fertile soil of entertainment. The publishing industry does a semi effective job at filtering out the unreadable crap that consists of 90% of the fiction out there on the internet. I’ve tried picking out the gems with limited success, but for the most part it’s a matter of an author having the talent and brass to do something dark and visceral in the first few paragraphs to nab my attention.