Choosing your significant details

I have a very active imagination and whenever I imagine a story I become quickly aware of a ridiculous amount of details about the plot and the characters. Very often—especially with short stories— I start with an idea that I believe is quite strong in its own right. However, if I dwell on it for a little while I start diluting the original idea in the mist of details I come up with. I enjoy the fact that the story is complete and alive and it makes me want to share just about everything with the readers when it comes to write it down. Quite often editors advising writers against keeping too much from the readers. I believe I have the opposite problem. How much detail is too much? How do you decide what background would be beneficial to create full-fledged characters and a believable storyline, and what information would simply weaken your main storyline?@chosekiei

What you have here is sort of like having too much money. Douglas Coupland called it option paralysis.

I spend half my life telling writers to spend more time exploring their fictional worlds, going deeper and deeper into them and recording as much as possible of the nearly-infinite details.

So you can skip that part of my life.

I spend the other half showing writers how to select the most telling and significant of those details for their stories. But you can’t select them until you’ve got them.

Go ahead and write all that stuff down. You bet. Write and write and write. You’re a writer! Write descriptions, write conversations, write scenes. Interview your characters. Paint word portraits of the rooms they live in, the gardens outside, the streets and cities they traverse every day. Go places and take copious notes. Call your friends up and ask them to look out their windows and tell you exactly what they see. Listen to everything that goes on in your fictional universe and write it down.

This is the iceberg.

Then go through and notate (circle or underline or bracket or use asterisks—sometimes I write it out on a fresh sheet of paper) the details that really leap out at you.

Of course, you now have tons of information about what happens to these people, and which plotline is the strongest, and which are secondary plotlines that—if you’re writing a short story—you must create separate stories for or—if you’re writing a novel—you must weave into the main plotline, in and out of that strongest plotline’s structure. And out of that you create your series of scenes.

Now when you’ve got scenes in mind to write, you have all that information at your fingertips. You write the scene carefully, envisioning these characters you know so well moving and acting and speaking in this environment you’ve personally inhabited, and whenever you need a significant detail to snap the scene into focus. . .there are your notes. Always keep your eye on the characters, what they’re doing and saying. Raymond Chandler had a habit of spending his first chapter on a description of a house. You can’t do that anymore. Think of your work as haiku—you’re looking for just those details that sketch this scene vividly and distinctly. Flannery O’Connor quoted a friend who said it takes three strokes. Make them the most fascinating strokes you can. (Not a glass on the table, but a square or pink glass or even a jelly jar. Not a lined face, but a face with deep grooves from nose to mouth or bags under the eyes or cross-hatching across the forehead. Not flowering trees but white almond trees or yellow belladonna bells hanging from branches or tulip trees with their blossoms pointing up.)

You’ll go over your notes again and again. After you’ve written lots of scenes set in one particular place or with one particular collection of characters or addressing one particular issue, you’ll go back during revision and re-read your notes to make sure you included every significant detail you intended. You didn’t? Excellent! Now you have something to drop into the climax of that scene to add that fresh, intriguing final layer.

This is the 10% of the iceberg that shows. As Hemingway said, it’s the other 90% that gives it its dignity.