Detail Your Story Like It's a Car You Love
Showing details in your writing isn’t just some annoying comment that agents, editors, and writing coaches, and teachers paste into every student’s work.
You can see it now, right?
Big red letters. Loopy script. Maybe an exclamation point:
SHOW MORE DETAILS!
- Every writing person ever
We do this not to be annoying (well, most of us), but because it’s important and we’re trying to help.
The thoughtco article by Richard Nordquist says it well.
“Specific details create word pictures that can make your writing easier to understand and more interesting to read.”
And we want readers to understand the world that we’re building on the page and be interested in it.
As Stephen Wilbers says,
“You are more likely to make a definite impression on your reader if you use specific, rather than abstract, words. Rather than ‘We were affected by the news,’ write ‘We were relieved by the news’ or ‘We were devastated by the news.’ Use words that convey precisely and vividly what you are thinking or feeling. Compare ‘Cutting down all those beautiful old trees really changed the appearance of the landscape’ with ‘In two weeks, the loggers transformed a ten thousand-acre forest of old growth red and white pine into a field of ruts and stubble.’
HERE, TAKE THIS EXAMPLE:
The man’s face was happy.
Can you think of ways to make that more specific?
A smile slowly formed on Shaun’s ruddy face, lifting the corners of his eyes with the movement.
There’s a difference there, right?
There’s a great quick MasterClass blog post that tells writers four ways to add those concrete details to our narrative.
THEY INCLUDE:
Making the initial sentence abstract and the remainder of the sentences in a paragraph concrete. I’m not into this really.
Use the senses—hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste. Let the reader smell diesel if the scene is on the side of the highway, taste the bitter coffee in the coffee shop, etc.
Be super specific and concrete like we just mentioned.
Remember to describe people and setting and action in a way that your reader can imagine. Don’t just say, “He sat under a tree.” Say, “He folded his legs beneath him, leaning on the gnarled trunk of the willow, its bark rough against the skin of his back, the tendrils flitting down—a perfect place to rest or maybe to hide.”
HERE’S THE THING:
When you write your novel or your short story, you are creating it bit by bit, word by word, to make connections with readers’ brains. You want them to be able to imagine your characters, feel things with them, know that they are not just floating in an unbearable whiteness of nothing.
For you to do that, you have to have details that are small and grounding so that the reader can visualize or feel connected to the character and the story. If those details aren’t there? The story tends to not resonate.
Details are the make or break moments of fiction.
But here’s the other big important factor: You don’t want to bog the reader down in too many details.
You want to be careful about getting addicted to details that don’t add anything. Sometimes us writers get addicted to our details because we think they make us seem clever like Jack Kerouac. Or because we’re just into them.
This:
Carrie pulled her hamster out of her pocket. He smelled like his cage.
Is not this:
Carrie pulled something out of her pocket. It smelled bad.
Is not this:
Carrie pulled Ham-Ham out of her pocket, a bit of hamster cage bedding stuck to his chubby, wriggling body. She wrinkled her nose. That stuff never smelled good.
Is not this:
Carrie pulled Ham-Ham’s rotund little body out of the pocket of her L.L. Bean green flannel shirt with the missing button down by the waistline of her cords, which she’d bought on Thred-Up, an internet resale clothing site. He wiggled as she grasped him in her fingers. One piece of hamster bedding stuck to his tan fur, right by his rump, which was round like the rest of him. With that bedding, came the fetid smell of urine, that ever-present hamster cage smell that persisted no matter how many times Carrie cleaned the cage, which was often, with water and a hamster-safe-cleaner she got at Mr. and Mrs. Pet in Ellsworth, the anchor store down at the no longer thriving Mill Mall on High Street, right by the pothole shaped like the state of Mississippi.
There’s a lot of differences there, right? And all those differences are mostly about the amount of details used.
SOME LINKS
Nordquist, Richard. “Specificity in Writing.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/specificity-words-1691983.
Nordquist, Richard. (2020, August 28). Exercise in Writing With Specific Details. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/exercise-in-writing-with-specific-details-1692404
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-use-concrete-details-to-enhance-your-writing#quiz-0