It’s In The Details Or Is It?

We all want to write wonderful prose that will paint pictures in the mind of readers, images of people, places, both ordinary and exotic, or events. We want to capture the essence of the character, the feel of the place, the sense of witnessing the events. To do this, we use words instead of visual media. This can be easier in that it’s more interactive and the reader’s imagination supplies the interpretation of our words. It’s harder because you need to focus images through the eye of the character even when the character might not pay attention to things the reader wants to see. I am having that problem with the Ghost stories. He’s a cat. He doesn’t pay attention to the same things a person does.

You can write long, narrative paragraphs filled with painstaking details, but that will cause most readers eyes to glaze over. Too many details can be information overload that quickly becomes counter productive. A reader may actually try to visualize the details offered into a coherent picture only to discover they have completely lost the point to the scene.

A few well chosen words can create instant understanding in most, though seldom all, of our readers. Surprisingly enough, you do not need a lot of descriptive detail to convey ideas. Ultimately, the ideas are the important thing. If you are describing a place, say a neighborhood your character drives into, you probably don’t need detailed descriptions, but rather a quick and concise evaluation of the place that the reader can instantly visualize to ground the scene.

Two examples:

He turned onto River Drive and the houses must have been built by a man who’d just discovered the jig saw and used it with gleeful abandon. – A Victorian neighborhood.

You could ignore the broken windows, the trash overflowing into the street, but dirty children playing on the steps at this late hour was deeply disturbing. - Any city slum, anywhere in the world.

To say the images generated by those two examples are radically different would be an understatement. In both cases they convey the kind of place it is without a lot of extraneous words. They are short. They say what they need to say and then they shut up.

If I need to ground a scene in time and place, I do my very best to apply the KISS principal – keep it simple stupid! Why write involved detailed descriptions of the elaborate scroll work that decorates a Victorian house, or the myriad of ugly things found in a slum late at night when what you really want to convey is the fanciful, overdecorated style or the depressing, perhaps slightly scary, squalor?

If I did try to write detailed descriptions of either scene, the character’s (and therefore the reader’s) reaction to the scene would be blunted. If it’s detailed enough, it might throw them out of the scene entirely. It will certainly bog down the flow of the story.

The same is true of characters, especially minor walkons like a hotel desk clerk or a waitress. In this case, the amount and kind of detail you write determines how important the character will be in the story. Give your walkons a single identifying characteristic and move on.

This KISS principal is, perhaps, most important when describing action. I can most easily explain why using battle scenes. Unless you are writing a treatise on combat techniques, you want to stay out of nearly all the fine details, in favor of a broader sense of what is happening.

If you have a small conflict involving two or three characters, say a mugging, you can use a few details seen through your main character’s POV and capture that character’s response to the situation. In a larger fight or a full fledged battle you cannot detail everything that happens or it simply won’t make sense. Those blow-by-blow descriptions will turn it into a tangled mess. Okay, a large battlefield is a tangled mess, but your writing about it should not be.

The larger the battle, the more of an overall view you need to take, at least if the battle itself is important to the story. You add details by jumping to different characters in different parts of the battle and picking up their POV for a brief glimpse of those parts. You don’t want to overdo even that. Keep those closeups to a minimum of what is both needful and beneficial for the story.

The big battle scenes in the Star Wars movies are a good video example. You have a large battle with different kinds of action taking place in separate locations at the same time. You don’t need to see every single thing that happens in every part , only what’s important.

No, creating images in the mind of a reader is not really in the details. The strong images come directly from within the characters as we experience them through their stories. The only important details are the ones the character finds important. Yeah, we writers need to keep our noses out of it.