Lifeless writing on a boring topic
Here's a cure from William Zinsser: turn it into a story about people .
The problem
William Zinsser:
“Often you’ll find yourself embarking on an article so apparently lifeless—the history of an institution, or some local issue such as storm sewers—that you will quail at the prospect of keeping your readers, or even yourself, awake.”
The Solution
“Take heart. You’ll find the solution if you look for the human element. Somewhere in every drab institution are men and women who have a fierce attachment to what they are doing and are rich repositories of lore. Somewhere behind every storm sewer is a politician whose future hangs on getting it installed and a widow who has always lived on the block and is outraged that some damn-fool legislator thinks it will wash away. Find these people to tell your story, and it won’t be drab.”
[…]
“I’ve proved this to myself often. Many years ago I was invited to write a small book for the New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its main building and millions of musty volumes. But behind the facade I found that the library had 19 research divisions, each with a curator supervising a hoard of treasures and oddities, from Washington’s handwritten Farewell Address to 750,000 movie stills. I decided to interview all those curators to learn what was in their collections, what they were adding to keep up with new areas of knowledge, and how their rooms were being used.”
“I found that the Science & Technology division had a collection of patents second only to that of the United States Patent Office and was therefore a second home to the city’s patent lawyers. But it also had a daily stream of men and women who thought they were on the verge of discovering perpetual motion. “Everybody’s got something to invent,” the curator explained, “but they won’t tell us what they’re looking for—maybe because they think we’ll patent it ourselves.” The whole building turned out to be just such a mixture of scholars and searchers and crackpots, and my story, though ostensibly the chronicle of an institution, was really a story about people.