By Mary Jaksch

Do you want to be a boring writer? No, of course you don’t!
But how to avoid it?

Do you sometimes read a piece that moves at an agonizingly slow pace? I do. Well, let me be honest here – I tend to read only the first paragraph, and then I put the boring book aside or flick over to another website.

Boring is bad. Boring is slow.

Enter Sol Stein. A master-editor who knows a trick or two. His book Stein On Writing
lies on my bedside table and is a source of constant inspiration.

Stein’s take on ‘boring’ is that we need to accelerate the pace of our pieces. This means compressing the perceived flow of time.

Pace is often the deciding factor whether what we write is read, or not.

That’s especially true when it comes to stuff we publish on the Net, as internet savvy readers all seem to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. Read more »