Writing What's Hidden · 3:20am Mar 22nd, 2018
Yes, another bit of writing-type advice from the Admiral!
This will become relavant later
Y'all remember about a week back or so I was gonna write a blog post about writing, but instead I wrote Cuddles?
Well, now I'm having another crack at it.
I should probably mention that I already wrote the whole thing, but it somehow felt unfocused and that I'd drifted off my main points and just degraded into some sort of random gibberish from which you could learn nothing except that I can write the most convoluted sentences when I don't put my mind to it.
Protip: outlines are sometimes useful. At least, that's what my English teacher said. Maybe I'll try using one some day.
Okay, now that that's out of my system, on to the good stuff (for some values of 'good.').
One thing that's fairly common knowedge among theatre-type people and model railroaders is that there's no point in modeling things that the intended audience won't see. For instance, in your typical theatre production, a brick wall might simply be a luan flat or even canvas with bricks painted on. On the backside (which the audience doesn't see) there might be random bits of scrap wood to hold it up, or even just tech cord (that's what theatre people call paracord) or gaffer's tape. As long as it stays up for the production, that's good enough.
Likewise, when you're modeling a city that can only be seen from one side, there's no sense in modeling the other side of the buildings. A few bits of styrene to hold the roof up are plenty good enough.
Not surprisingly, this also is useful to consider about for writing.
Since I don't want to give away all the secrets behind some of my stories, I'll start with an example from the show.
Back in Episode 100, we discovered that Vinyl and Octavia share a house, and we got a look at their living room.
And that's all we saw (well, there were an exterior shots, too, but never mind that).
That's all that was needed for that scene.
Now, we viewers will presume that there are other rooms in the house that we didn't see. Vinyl got a bottle of milk from somewhere, which is presumably a kitchen. If the ponies are actual biological beings, there's probably a bathroom in the house somewhere, and most of us probably also assumed that there is some quantity of bedrooms in that house (headcanons vary—I assume that they have a shared bedroom and the bed is in the exact middle of the house and they pay extra for sheets that are sensible and refined on one side and rocket ships on the other).
I assume that the animators and storyboard artists and scriptwriters never gave those other rooms a moment of thought. They used what they needed for the episode, and that was that. If later on we return to the house and the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom somehow become relevant to an episode, then we'll have a scene there. Otherwise, it's up to our imagination how those rooms look or if they even exist at all.*
Using that thought, when you're writing a scene for a story, you don't have to imagine the whole thing. You don't have to carefully plot out every room in the house; you can only focus on the rooms you care about, the rooms where the action takes place, and leave the rest to the reader's imagination.
And it's not just rooms in houses. There are all sorts of details that you can leave out because they aren't really essential to the story.
There are a lot of details in my stories where my pre-readers ask me about something specific, and a lot of times, I don't acutally have an answer. For example, this comment in Spring Comes to Snow Hill:
“Pappy would say whenever you went out to get fresh wood how you had the sap in your veins, and—”
“Mayhap that's so. I reckon Maple Leaf's old enough.”
I feel like there's a non-negligible chance I'll regret asking, but what would the rest of this sentence have been?
I have no idea. I just ended it where it felt natural.
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*Of course, that's why there are fanfiction writers, to fill in the gaps that the show creators left.
Admittedly, this advice is probably more useful to people writing in a visual medium, but it's still something to consider. When you're developing your wonderful OC Edgy McEdgerston the red and black alicorn, don't spend too much time thinking about his parents and grandparents and so on unless it really matters to the story.
Source mercifully unknown
This segues kind of neatly into the next point, and it's also something that I've learned from reading Model Railroad magazine: if you superdetail some scenes, people will assume that you've superdeatiled all the scenes.
For example, in The Trek to Ice Cream Rock, I mentioned that they towed the boat down to the lake, and that it was on a trailer. But nobody ever wondered who did the pulling, or whether the route was on a road or just across the grass. Nobody thought about where Sea Swirl keeps it—is it behind her house? Does she have a garage for it? Whoever towed it—probably Coco Crusoe—must have been wearing a harness; did he take it off, or did he keep it on when he was rowing the boat across the lake?*
None of those details really mattered to the story, so they weren't even mentioned. And I'll bet that there weren't any of my readers who were wondering why I hadn't addressed it.
Now, I'm not saying that this isn't the kind of thing that you shouldn't think about when you're plotting out a story. I think for any kind of detail, you ought to have at least some vague idea of how it might work, but that doesn't mean that you have to explain it in the story. As long as you've got enough that the reader can picture it in their mind, you've got enough for most things.
I believe that I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts about how I was at a real word count crunch in Spring Comes to Snow Hill, and one of the luckiest deletions was that one of my pre-readers wondered why I had a paragraph mentioning Red leaving the sap sledge in the grove overnight.
The reason was that neither Winter Berry nor Sugar Bush could tow it, and if there wasn't a sap sledge to empty the sap into, there was no point in them gathering it . . . but the fact that he asked meant that it wasn't something that had tripped him up, and that meant that I could probably delete it, and save those words for where they would have more effect.
[Also as I write this, it occurs to me that maybe I'm not the best to give advice on leaving things out to streamline a story.]
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*Coco pulled it; it was across grass because they don't have proper roads in Ponyville; Sea Swirl keeps it behind her house, mostly covered with a canvas tarp (the derrick is too tall to cover); Coco took off his harness before they pushed it into the lake and just left his harness with the wagon.
That's not to say that you, the author, should just ignore the behind-the-scenes stuff. Just like your model railroad needs hidden wiring and switch motors to keep the whole thing going, if you care about continuity at all, you need to think about some of this stuff, even if it will never actually make it into the story.
But you don't necessarily have to think about it in great detail, and if you think about it in just one level of detail, there's a good chance that your readers will accept it.
One of my favorite examples of that is in Firefly. The engines break, and with it, life support. The component that failed was the port catalyzer . . . what does what, exactly? We don't know, but we do know that even if it's a nothing part, the engine needs it or else they haven't got life support on the ship.
Source
I was googling for an image of the catalyzer or a ponified Firefly crew and got this, which is either a google epic fail or a google epic win.
Obviously, different writers have different styles. Some of us like to focus on technical details, and others are more interested in the characters and their relationship with the world, and aren't worried at all about the details.
And different story types have different goals, which of course necessitates a different type of storytelling. Sometimes the journey is the story, whereas other times there's no point in writing about the journey at all, because what really matters is that our characters got to Canterlot to advance the plot, and you can skip over the part where they bought train tickets and packed their saddlebags and so forth.
I guess if you take nothing else away from this, when you're struggling with a particular section or detail in your story, it might be worth taking a step back and asking if it's a detail that you actually need.
Of course, if you're doing heavy worldbuilding and planning to come back later, sometimes it's good to have that outline of details in your head. Really long, epic tales like Wheel of Time would be a confusing morass of continuity errors if the author wasn't careful to keep track of what details he used where and how they tied together.
So there's a balance.
Just because you got this song stuck in my head with that preview image.
Continuity is fast and loose in the MLP toon with floorplans, too. That library got more windows appearing and vanishing, just like Hogwarts mutated during filming of Harry Potter, with Hagrid's hut moving three times, I believe.
I compulsively work out all of those random details, whether I include them in the scene or not, because I've GMed Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs for far too long.
It doesn't matter if the only important information in the whole town is at 123 Apple Street. Someone in the party will be certain they've missed something of crushing importance if they don't also thoroughly investigate 121 and 125 Apple Street, and you either need to be very ready to improv, or very ready with information.
Seriously, I once ran Rise of the Runelords for a newbie group, and the entire party abandoned the festival in the opening scenes (which sets off the plot) to go investigate the theater across town, because they thought the theater owner seemed suspicious.
Ah. I see you and I subscribe to very different stykes of model railroading. That may explain why my layout has taken so long to leave the planning stages.
Well, actually. Rooms in houses can sometimes make a huge impact on the reader. *cough*
But seriously details like that - only sometimes, in very specific situations - need to be accurate. ie, if characters are moving through several rooms at a time, you really need to have a feel for how they're all connected, you can't just say 'they went to the living room, then the kitchen, then the shed, then the bathroom.' Not the best example, I'm aware, but there does come a time when things like that are crucial. You really have to see if through the reader's eyes, because they may just work out something in their head that breaks your written reality. But of course in most scenarios, you could just say 'they toured the house.'
Now that I totally agree with. I think what you meant to say with this whole blog is: "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to remove."
I fucking loved Firefly. Especially because the tech in it was the total opposite of Star Trek. You know, the inane technobabble and the shiny smooth devices that are all just perfectly replicated super-advanced technology that's so far beyond us that it just seems like magic. (Though I did appreciate that they kind of tried to stray away from that in DS9.) But in Firefly, the ship was a junky ass piece of shit. It was a machine. With gears and parts and nuts and bolts, and repaired with wrenches and hammers. So good.
It's tempting, but it's so easy to get lost in the minutiae, especially when you're trying to make a reader-driven experience like tabletop games.
Do you do any model railroading? We used to, when we had the space.
Then again, Ive always been very short sighted and corrective spectacles onto do so for a small central region, so most models I look at I cant see the detail. Is it roughly blue, green, red, black, is it short, medium, long, bendy, does it have bits sticking out front, back, middle. Why does it have a face?
A model display railway group that tours the area has a double table setup of the local towns lost railway and station. There is a cat a couple mm long on a shed roof, and slightly larger fox in the field above the tunnel.
Be careful when planning too much detail as well, the computer can only follow what you tell it to, because even though games can use hardware assisted pixel level collision detection for the last 30 years at least, and ray tracers use intersection functions, its difficult and expensivee still to add as a basic function to 3D modeling and layout.
How else can you explain a brand new bus station being built, where the first bus through gets stuck, except that they modeled the station to the millimetre in the computer, using a standard perfect non existant bus, driven by a standard perfect non existant driver.
Ever notice that as cars get bigger and roads remain the same size, they dont model it as cars remaining the same size and roads getting narrower for flow purposes? Or that they think things are going well because traffic density is decreasing only for the simple fact that larger cars means you can fit less of them in a given stretch of road, even when they are jammed together?
The Discord is in the details.
And I never know when to stop.
A helpful point to keep in mind. Building a cohesive, consistent world is a laudable goal, but not if you're so obsessed over the logistics of trade between Fillydelphia and San Fratello that you forget you're writing a fluffy Mane 6 shipfic.
Also, now I can't help but think of my grandfather's model trains, arranged on a E-shaped series of tables so you could see most buildings from every angle.
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In both cases, one can likely blame high concentrations of background magic as a Watsonian explanation. Hagrid's hut often needs to dodge some of the more dangerous inhabitants of the Forbidden Forest, and the library tree actually grew its own windows (which explains how Twilight could afford having Rainbow Dash as a friend.)
Unless your name is Tolkien, in wich case your personal satisfaction will depend on your aptitude at thinking of all the litle detail. All of them.
That was a helpful post, especially the analogy about theatre props. Thank you, Sir.
Thanks Biscuit and yes I know my story is still not fully worked out.
*slacking horse noises*
I'm a very big believer that you should leave out things that aren't necessary to the story, but when you describe something that is a big part of the story, the level of detail should clue the reader in that something important is happening.
Of course, then you might get a reader who skips over a crucial scene of character development because "this whole chapter could be summed up in three sentences so we could get to the plot."
Screw that, my fic's an exploration fic, we're getting all the details! Where does Equestrian magic originate from? I got you covered. How much of its origins do the various species know? I'm on top of it. How does Equestrian medical science relate to this? Yup, have that too.
Is it even going to come up? Ehhhhhh... Probably as a throwaway conversation.
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I figure you're doing it right when half the people have that reaction, and the other half go "OMG, the attention to detail!"
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Not just personal satisfaction; I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the most enduring and influential fantasy stories of the past whenever has reams & reams of associated genealogies, timelines, maps, etc.
To extend the analogy: you may not need to actually build the stretch of road that goes behind the warehouse, but if you don't at least sit down and sketch out where it would go, the ends will end up misaligned, and it'll look funny. And it's a subtle error, one that most people won't consciously notice, but it's there.
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I probably should have been more specific in the blog. Yeah, if there's a lot of stuff that you need to keep track of or which might be important later, you do need to keep track of it. But for some things, you could potentially flesh out the details later, if needed. For example, I might mention that Vinyl and Octavia's house had a staircase off the kitchen, but have no particular idea what's upstairs until I needed it for a story.
Plus, I bet even in a long series like Wheel of Time, there are some throwaway details that don't really matter in the long continuity of things, and there are probably also some things that the author doesn't have a specific answer for, because it doesn't matter in the story.
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I couldn't think of a better opening image.
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Oh yeah, in the series they don't worry too much about continuity at all. There's probably not an official Ponyville map of any sort. Heck, even characters don't always have real strong continuity (IIRC, wasn't Minuette/Colgate somepony that lived in Canterlot when the episode required that she did, even though she'd been seen plenty of times in Ponyville before that?).
Of course, regarding Ponyville, it gets destroyed by monsters often enough that that's a good excuse for buildings not always being in the same place. . . .
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I usually went with 'ready to improv,' with a binder full of NPCs and encounters that I could use when my players went off the reservation. Wound up in one game with a fighter losing a drinking contest and getting pressed into service on a ship, and then the rest of the players had to go rescue him. That was fun.
What I've found is that a lot of times if you can come up with decent characters on the fly (or in advance, as the case may be) that the players will assume that they're on the right track. Well, I suppose it depends on the players.
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There's nothing inherently wrong with modelling the whole thing (and of course if you do change your layout and want to use it somewhere else, you might have to model the stuff you didn't bother with before). But I've always subscribed to the theatre attitude--if you can't see it, don't worry about it.
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Yes and no.
True, thinking about detail help you build a cohesive stroy and universe, but that level of detail? It is useless.
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Well, yeah; it very much depends on the case. If I were writing a mystery story, for example, I might want to give the reader the detail early on that the staircase is right next to the pantry or something like that, because it could be important later. Or any other particular detail. On the other hand, there are certainly cases where a character opens the front door and then goes upstairs is all the detail that you need. It's very much circumstance driven,
Well, I don't know about that entirely. I mean, you could shorten LoTR to "Frodo took the ring and tossed in the volcano," but I think the story would lose a lot of its charm if you did that.
I think it's better to say when you've got the right balance of detail and pacing and plot development and so forth, and that depends on the story you're writing.
Really, in writing I think that there aren't all that many rules. Best practices, maybe, but there's always a circumstance to avoid them.
Yeah, everything in that universe kind of hung together in a way that some other Sci-Fi shows really don't. As I recall, some of the ships in Star Wars were pretty crappy, too, but it wasn't a believable crappy.
I hadn't really thought about the lack of gadgets, but you're right--there wasn't as much of the fancy super futuristic stuff as there is in a lot of sci-fi shows, which I think was a good choice.
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The easiest thing I've found for tabletop games is to have lots of stuff sort of ready to go and insert where appropriate. Rather than plan out all the encounters (because my players always came up with something I didn't expect), I had a book of characters that I could use at a moment's notice, with notes on skills and things that might affect the encounter. Then I'd just pick the next one on the list when the time came.
Not really at the moment, 'cause I haven't got the space or the free time. Once I get the back room remodeled, then I think I'm going to run trains around two walls; until then, they're all up on shelves in one of my rooms.
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Yeah, that's probably not something you'd normally need to think about. Unless, of course, the two ponies in question are competing shipping agents, in which case it could be a major plot point.
There's many situations where that's the case, and then of course you have to model more of the building.
One interesting tip that got mentioned in an older issue of Model Railroader was a guy who had an arrangement where you could only see one side of the train was that he had most of his cars lettered differently on opposite sides, thus effectively doubling his fleet.
Interestingly, transparent wood is actually a thing that exists. Although it's lab-created. . . .
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Being super nearsighted is sometimes an advantage, at least when you're close to the action . . . I could take off my glasses and read all the tiny little writing on my model trains, and when I painted figures, I didn't need a magnifier to see what I was doing. Of course, at that range, it didn't take too long for the paint fumes to cause headaches, which was a disadvantage. . . .
I had one in high school that had a scale Batwing(TM) crashed into the wooded hillside behind the train shed. I've also got some tiny little red-winged blackbirds for my next layout. Bought them at a convention a few years back.
It's actually interesting thinking about how back when I started being interested in model railroading, there were instructions for how to use simple relays to control stuff and whatnot, and now people are talking about how they're using Arundo boards for advanced signal logic.
"Imagine a spherical bus. . . . "
Are cars getting bigger? They're getting heavier, but I'm less certain of the overall dimensions. Still, it's kind of tricky; my dad's Mercury Sable was actually about a foot longer than his Aerostar minivan. You wouldn't think it when you looked at them, but when you parked them side by side, it was obvious.
That's always the trick. And I don't have any particularly useful advice regarding that. Just enough but not too many.
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Unless your name is Tolkien, in wich case your personal satisfaction will depend on your aptitude at thinking of all the litle detail. All of them.
Well, yes.
And I'll admit that I do love a lot of the fiddly little details, but I also tend to leave a lot of stuff out that I could put in.
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You're quite welcome!
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Slacking is okay.
I've been doing a bit of it myself this last week.
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I think that it really depends on writing style, at least to an extent. For example, two writers who I like are Alistair MacLean and Robert B. Parker. MacLean likes describing scenery and boats practically down to the tree and rivet, whereas Parker's novels are sometimes so thin on setting details that they could be screenplays.
I think that sometimes yes, you want to describe something that's going to be important later on you might want to put extra effort into it, but I think that it's also important to immerse your readers with certain unimportant details that help set the scene without being terribly important to the overall story otherwise, like in A Morning at the Farrier's where Peachy Sweet and Caramel are debating whether side-backer or D-ring harnesses are better.
But yeah, you don't want to go too far with that.
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How many nails hold the average pony's horseshoes on?
I've sometimes done a stupid amount of research for a throwaway conversation. Eh, it is what it is.
That's what I tend to get, and I'm okay with that.
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Yeah, and that does make it easier to build a universe around it, too, if you've got all that foundation to build upon. But, to contrast that, if you're writing a short and fluffy MLP shipfic, you probably don't need to sketch out a map of the entirety of the pony lands before you start writing it.
Yes, I'd say that's a pretty good summary. You need to at least have the basic detail of where the road is, although what the road's made out of might be completely unimportant to the scene.
There was a recent discussion in the writer's group where I took a pretty strong stance that you absolutely should go to the effort of fleshing out the unseen specifics of your locations and characters even if they will never be shown in the story itself, but I guess I can see why you'd feel differently if you're approaching it in terms like that. I don't know a lot about theater, but I do know a bit about graphics design, and one of the earliest tricks you learn is that it really doesn't matter if that character model walks through a solid wall off-camera, because an animation that nobody will ever see is an hour of work that you might as well have spent doing nothing instead for how much of a wasted effort it is.
It's not all that different from designing stage scenery in that regard, I imagine. It's both built with only ever being viewed from one specific angle in mind. The thing about stage design is that a lot of it is really an abstraction. An entire stageplay's worth of scenery can't possibly fit on one little stage without compressing it down to fit within the limits of the medium of presentation. The audience doesn't mind that the castle backdrop is really just painted cardboard, because they weren't expecting a real castle to begin with. They came in expecting to see actors pretending that walking off the stage actually means being out of sight, so they're willing to pretend as well.
The problem with taking the same approach to written fiction is that even though it all exists only in the reader' imagination, the world the story describes is not an abstracted stage backdrop. It's supposed to be a real world, with real people, and no limited angle of vision exists to keep the reader from imagining what should be there, how things ought to be happening. When the story ignores that a castle actually isn't just painted cardboard and that freeclimbing up the outside of a 200 feet tall tower should really have taken a lot longer than it did, no matter how important it is that they reach the top before the evil wizard finishes climbing the stairs, the discrepancy suddenly feels a lot more irritating and noticeable. Whether it's because of the writer simply not paying attention or just deciding to ignore it for the dramatic effect, something didn't fit together the way it should have had and the world feels just a little less real to the readers who noticed.
Even if no one ever gets to see the inside of that tower, having some kind of idea of just what is in there that could've taken your wizard that long to deal with helps a lot with making what does get described feel more believable and complete. Scratches, singed robes and a torn sleeve go a long way to creating the impression of being filled to the brim with all kinds of time-consuming traps and locks that you really shouldn't try to climb in a hurry.
There's a limit to how much detail is necessary or sensible for a location that's entirely off-screen, but simply for the sake of consistency and making sure off-screen and on-screen characters act on the same timescale, it makes sense to at least have a rough idea of what actually is in all those empty rooms that aren't important enough to bother describing them.
And then you get compulsive worldbuilders like me who find themselves working out the life-story of characters that aren't even going to be in the actual story.
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I don't believe in any unnecessary words. Every detail has a purpose. Why did her eyes dart that way, why do we see the details that she sees?
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None. You think that any self-respecting, civilized pony would nail hunks of metal to their hooves? Would you wear shoes that you couldn't take off at the door?
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I'm not opposed to doing lots of behind-the-scenes stuff, or having an answer for questions which may arise in the story. [Although interestingly that's likely to be less of a problem in actual, published fiction; at least for me since I like to actually reply to comments (not always quickly, though :P) I need to have an answer to stuff that I might not have put in the story . . . which is also part of the reason for the blog posts on most stories/chapter updates.] The real question that I was meaning to address in the blog post was whether or not it needed to go in the actual story. One can probably get the gist of the Bible without all the begats.
The devil is always in the details. Of course there's suspension of disbelief in a read work as well as a stage play. It's a different suspension, especially since the reader is (hopefully) doing all the visual work in their heads rather than having it presented to them, but it's still there.
Obviously, we don't want sloppy details. We don't want to read that Applejack is picking apples in the orchard and then five minutes later she's in Canterlot because plot convenience. But by the same token, we generally don't want to actually describe in exacting detail how every character's day went, nor do we normally need to put in great detail how they got dressed in the morning for example. Obviously, that's not a hard and fast rule; there are plenty of stories where that kind of detail might be vitally important to the plot, but in general if a character takes a ten hour trip to get from plot point A to plot point B, I probably shouldn't write it so that it takes you ten hours to read. You're willing to accept when you read a story that characters are doing things like breathing and eating and pooping and sleeping and so forth even if the author doesn't explicitly say so. Which leads into:
Yeah, exactly. A short summary of the perils he faced, and possibly even a few keyed references (another bat flew out of a window) suggest the dangers without going overly long into describing every single step he climbed. And again, that's assuming that most of the journey is important to the story; in some stories, simply saying "four hours later, robes singed, the wizard finally arrived at the top floor" is all that's really needed.
I think that that depends a lot on the story, really. I mean, for a walking around Ponyville story, I'm not going to worry too much about what's in any given pony's house. Rooms with stuff in them is probably plenty good enough. Maybe sketch out a few important ones, but otherwise it's just background detail.
I guess overall how much planning should go into a particular place or character is probably directly related to how important that character is to the plot, and what the overall nature of the story is. For a million word epic first-person story, you'd better basically be able to be the protagonist, whereas for a simple five thousand word one-shot that you're never going to revisit, there's probably nothing to be gained by spending six months worldbuilding.
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Heh, I've found myself doing that sometimes with throwaway characters in D&D.
Heck, that's probably also part of the reason I have a fair number of stories that focus on obscure background ponies. I bet there aren't any stories other than mine that star Apple Honey. There might not be any others who even mention her.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/6/5/1171191__safe_artist-colon-birdyboop_apple+honey_apple+tarty_oc_deer_solo.png
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The problem with telling that to aspiring writers is that you can wind up with people writing this version of The Speckled Band:
"We were chilling in Sherlock's study when Helen Stoner came to tell us she feared for her life. We went to her house and discovered that Dr. Roylott intended to use a venomous snake to kill her so he could collect the money from her late mother's will."
That could probably be summarized further, but it conveys basically everything that we need to know about that story.
I totally get where you're coming from, and I don't think that it's necessary or desirable to have a story that's bogged down with a zillion irrelevant details that don't advance the plot in some way or another, but I also don't think that limiting yourself to that extent is wise.
And let's be totally honest here, because I think a lot of story-writing isn't as planned as English professors would have us believe. I don't pick through my stories with the idea of whether or not something is absolutely needed to advance the story or as a way to reveal more about the character or any of those other noble goals that the 'greats' supposedly did. It's rare that I actually consider a particular line with as much scrutiny as I did with the part of Red leaving the wagon in the grove, and the only reason I had that much focus on it was that I had a word count and I was nearly over it. But I could just as easily have dropped the part where Maple mistakes an umbilical cord for a penis, and I'm not sure which was a better thing to leave in the story overall. Maybe in a hundred years when somebody is analyzing my work (unlikely, but it could happen) they'll foolishly think that I pondered over every single character twitch and whether or not it needed to be in the story. The truth is that that I put it there because it felt right to me.
Now, it could be that I'm simply a genius, but I really don't think so. Decent, at best.
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Ha, you read my comment and understood the exact opposite of what I meant.
I meant that you, as the author, should include details in order to advance the story but also to characterize and worldbuild. Details shouldn't be included just to describe things. Include detail, but do so purposefully.
Going back to my first comment, someone commented on a story of mine complaining that the single most crucial, emotional moment of character development - wherein the protagonist sees things that make her think, and that causes her to make choices that set her on a radically different path - had too much detail.
All the details were the important part. That's what I was saying.
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Reading something and tragically missing the point is something that I do.
Heck, speaking of detail, in that Next Generation contest that Jaxie's hosting, I noticed that one of the stories had radically different opinions on the level of detail (I liked how much there was; one of the other readers thought it was too much). So it's not like there's some formula that will make everyone happy.
Sometimes that's a level of subtlety that gets lost on the reader, I've noticed. But when properly done and properly read, it is wonderful.
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