Avi

word craft

blog

All about details

John, from River­head, NY, writes, “I love all the detail in your books. How do you find it, and then decide what to do about it?”

details

Well, John, the infor­ma­tion comes from lots of places; things I have noticed, remem­bered, read about, or researched. But know­ing the details is one thing, what do with it is quite anoth­er. There are count­less styles of writ­ing. Some writ­ing is very sparse, with almost no phys­i­cal details. If you look at book of mine such as Who Was That Masked Man Any­way? there is no descrip­tive detail what­so­ev­er. It’s all dia­logue. Then, con­sid­er a book like Traitor’s Gate, where there is so much descrip­tion that one review­er com­ment­ed that the City of Lon­don (where the sto­ry takes place) is depict­ed in such detail it was vir­tu­al­ly a char­ac­ter in the story.

In oth­er words, it is the nature of the book that deter­mines how much and what kind of detail you wish to write. That is to say, detail, or the lack of it, defines the kind of sto­ry you are telling. More­over, the kind of detail you put in makes a big dif­fer­ence. The detail in Crispin helps reveal the medieval world. The detail in Sophia’s War help reveal the cru­el­ty of British Pris­ons. The details in the Pop­py books reveal the characters.

More­over, what you leave out is just as impor­tant as what you put in. I think the best way to decide about detail, is that it should give life to the expe­ri­ence being nar­rat­ed. Too much detail and you have a text­book. Too lit­tle and it’s hard to see the characters.

No won­der folks say, “The Dev­il is in the details.”

1 thought on “All about details”

  1. Details are hard to deal with, at least for me, because some writ­ers dump them upon you and oth­ers seem to leave them out—in such a way that it detracts from your under­stand­ing of the sto­ry. It real­ly takes a per­fect bal­ance… And that’s hard to find.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.