I came across an interesting article on what makes something interesting -- this question should be of considerable interest to writers. On the one hand the answer may seem obvious in hindsight, but I suspect only in hindsight.
The piece poses the question in academic context of social theories, but I think it applies fairly directly to works of literature:
"QUESTION: How do theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting? ANSWER: Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their audience, while non-interesting theories are those which affirm certain assumptions of their audience."
As the discussion points out, one implication of this claim is that writers must understand their audience (including knowing the assumptions they generally hold) in order to come up with interesting theses. Further, the author cautions that this works best with the audience's weakly held assumptions - that firmly held assumptions are difficult to dislodge and the author risks being branded a crackpot.
The catalog of exemplar interesting theories is worth cataloging. These fit the pattern I will spell out here for the first one.
- Organization: What seems to be an organized phenomenon is in reality disorganized, or what seems to be a disorganized phenomenon is in reality organized.
- Composition: (heterogeneous phenomenon versus being just one)
- Abstraction: (holistic versus individual phenomenon)
- Generalization: (individual versus universal)
- Stabilization: (time variant versus invariant)
- Function: (function versus dysfunction)
- Evaluation: (seeming good versus bad)
- Co-relation
- Co-existent
- Opposition
- Causation
Davis, Murray S., That's Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology , Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1:4 (1971:Dec.) p.309
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