Or more specifically, like reading a technical manual.

He said the problem is that I have way too much details, but I feel the details are necessary to really develop who the character is. Should I trash some (or a lot) of this detail and replace it with action then?

...or, to put it this way...should I be worried about my story being nothing more but this 'infodump' thing I keep hearing about?

If you stop the action and have a paragraph or more of pure description, history, or back story, you're writing an info dump. Much of this really is important to the character and the story. The trick is to repackage it, or slip it in a way that feels natural. Think of how the characters themselves might encounter and view this information.

I love dialog and POV thoughts for establishing things.

I never use the "narrator" voice to tell my stories. I feel that to use the "narrator" is tantamount to dues ex machina.

I'll add this: you don't necessarily need to replace detail with action. You might just need to give fewer details, and focus more on making them the right details.

Two of my favorite writing books are Description by Monica Wood and Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. Both address these issues in different ways.

Description talks about getting the description right. (Go figure.) It's not the number of details that you include -- and it sounds like you might have a tendency to include a lot of details -- it's what the right detail tells you.

Characters and Viewpoint makes character-building personal -- raising the emotional stakes, "performing" the characters so that they come alive, etc.

Also, though I sound like a broken record, I think that cutting your text can make a big difference. If the novella is "boring", can you cut 20-40% of it to pick up the pace?

* Are you showing _and_ telling?

** (Recent example from my blog: "The bales were dusty and heavy and Micah's back ached from wrestling them over the cart's high sidewall."

** We know the bales were heavy because Micah's back ached, so cut one of the descriptors: "Micah's back ached from wrestling the dusty bales over the cart's high sidewall." 27% less text to read.

** Heck, "wrestling" implies that he's struggling with the weight, so you might just say, "Micah wrestled the dusty bales over the cart's high sidewall." 44% less text to read.)

* Are you using a lot of passive voice?

* Are you stringing together prepositional phrases?

You get the idea. Mercilessly hack out 30% of your novella -- a painful process, I know -- let it sit for a month, and then come back to it to see if you can tell what's missing. If you can't, you probably didn't need it.

Hope this helps.

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...he said it was boring.

Or more specifically, like reading a technical manual.

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That's not bad, really. I mean, that second part isn't so bad. I've read two different blogs recently that said technical writers were the new hot thing in the fiction world. In the old days, many good writers had been journalists--Hemingway, I think was an example. Today, tech writers are filling that role.

Of course, I may have invested too much interest in those blogs. Guess what I do for a living?

At any rate, boring is bad.

Boring can be many things. If your not sure what is wrong you can either a) grill your reader for more information, or b) get more readers and grill them. Is there a specific part that bored them? Can they show you a paragraph or two that really hit rock bottom?

Also, make sure each scene has tension and purpose. I don't know your novella, but say your lead character is a cop and she needs to interrogate a suspect. If the suspect just tells her everything he knows, who cares. If he's evasive, it will begin to add tension. If he's more interested in flirting with her than answering questions, it adds another kind of tension. The key to tension, often, is obstacles. So look at each scene and see if it has an obstacle that helps build some tension. That may help with the boredom issue, some.

I came back, though. It's just too darn charming.

Anne goes on a picnic with her friends. They find a grave, and retell a romantic story. Wahoo. It has zilch, zero, nada, NOTHING to do with the story. My wife skips this when she re-reads. My wife, who has read the whole series at least five times.

My point is that it's not only words in sentences that can be unnecessary, but whole paragraphs, chapters, or even chapter-spanning events. Can a single event tell the story as well as two of them? If it can, use the single. This part is funny/emotional/character-building/etc., but is it really necessary? If not, murder it. Murder your darlings...

Boring is bad. It is the exact opposite of what you should be trying to accomplish. If you really feel all the detail is necessary, and that your friend is wrong, you could try having a few others read your story.

It is often necessary for the writer to have oodles of details worked out for their stories, but normally a reader will require far less, maybe only a tenth, to enjoy a story.

They want to see a character pitted against a true nemesis, see what the character does to confront/defeat/escape the nemesis (because the stakes are high and the character must deal with it), they want to be in touch with the characters thoughts and emotions through the struggle, and they want to see the resolution/outcome of the struggle.

You say, "I feel the details are necessary to really develop who the character is." The details are probably certainly necessary - to your back-story. Perhaps it would help to focus, not on what 'I feel', but on what the reader will feel is relevant and engaging.

(Maybe that technical manual of yours is actually your back-story, to keep close to hand while you write the real story. Which means it's not wasted effort.)

If the excess detail is about character, perhaps it's better told through action and dialogue than a long passage of background information.

If the excess detail is technical, how much of it is really necessary to the stories? Asimov's robot stories had very little technical detail about the robots - they had positronic brains, looked roughly human, were all programmed with three laws, and that was about it. Since the stories were about the three laws and the interactions between humans and robots, that was all we needed to know. Anything else was fed to us, often through Dr. Susan Calvin, as and when we needed to know it.

(I can imagine there's an audience out there for excessive detail. For example, they publish Star Trek technical manuals, I have one somewhere. But I think that too much technical stuff will probably narrow the audience, because for every one that reads it, several will yawn and skip it - unless it's clearly relevant to the story.)

I've read in books on writing SF that the infodump is one of SF&F's big, unique challenges, because we have to introduce a whole new world to the reader. Doing it without being boring, in such a fashion as to draw the reader in, is part of the art, methinks.

Cheers,
Pat

I'm not going to give you any advice about what to do with your story because, quite frankly, without reading it I can't say what struck your friend as boring or how you would change it. This is where the author has to make a few hard choices. Something can be boring for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is personal taste that has nothing to do with how other readers would respond.

So, first of all, I'd get another critique for comparison. I rarely make changes based on one person's crits unless it is a person I know and trust and am used to dealing with.

Edit: And even with someone I know and trust, I probably want more than one, because anyone can be mistaken. After that you have to use your own judgment because no matter who crits it YOU are the author.

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That's not bad, really. I mean, that second part isn't so bad. I've read two different blogs recently that said technical writers were the new hot thing in the fiction world. In the old days, many good writers had been journalists--Hemingway, I think was an example. Today, tech writers are filling that role.

Of course, I may have invested too much interest in those blogs. Guess what I do for a living?

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But that simply is not necessary. I remember reading of one author (it might have been OSC) talking about a main character in one of his novels. Not once had he given any physical description of her. He simply let the reader fill in those details with their imaginations--and that's OK.

Use familiarity to your advantage. If your character lives in a city, you don't have to describe the city very much. Your readers already know what a city looks like. Include only details that are unusual and/or of particular relevence to the storyline.

If your character is a man, your reader doesn't need to know that he has male characteristics. In fact your reader doesn't even need to know your character's facial features, hair color, height--nothing--UNLESS it is particularly unusual AND/OR particularly crucial to the storyline. Everything else the reader will form in his/her own mind.

And UNLESS the details are crucial to the storyline, it doesn't matter AT ALL if the reader's mental image of these details fits yours. Get over that idea right now. IT DOES NOT MATTER IF THE READER'S MENTAL IMAGE IS THE SAME AS YOURS...unless it's something particularly crucial to the story.

I hope my redundancy has effectively helped me make my point.

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I remember reading of one author (it might have been OSC) talking about a main character in one of his novels. Not once had he given any physical description of her. He simply let the reader fill in those details with their imaginations...

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It was OSC. He said that his agent (or editor) mentioned it, as an afterthought. He asked if she had a mental picture of the protagonist, and the agent (or editor) responded that she had, and proceded to describe herself.