Solastalgia on Refuse: A Journal of Iconoclasms
3 years ago
Saturday, October 18, 2008
When is it overkill?
Okay, so the topic today is how does a writer know when to stop with the details in a story. What is reasonable to assume your readers know? This is a subject I'm constantly struggling with in my own writing. From an artist's viewpoint, I want to paint as clear a picture as possible to my audience of what is happening in the story -- a mental movie, if you will. But there are instances when I am reviewing my work and I'm like, "Dang! I'm like that person who won't shut up at a party!" I believe that everyone knows someone who is so intent on describing the minutae that they lose their audience, whether it be out of boredom or because he or she has strayed so far off topic, they have no idea what the hell the point is anymore. When reviewing some of my pieces, it is hard for me to figure out what is relevant and what isn't to the story. I mean, I KNOW what I want to say, I can SEE the story/movie playing in my head, but I'm afraid of ASSUMING that the reader knows what I'm talking about. So I end up in Overkill Land. The only solution I have come up with is when I finish writing something, I hand it off to a friend for review, preferably to someone I haven't been brainstorming with because they know what my intentions are in a story. Also, the value of workshopping can not be underrated either. What I would like to know is for all of those professional writers out there, do they struggle with this issue also? Or do they hand off their work for review to either friends or editors in order to find out if they need to add or subtract from their stories? It would help to know what the Chosen Ones think on this topic of details.
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1 comment:
haha, I like your journal's subtitle.
Details... When you read a sentence back, think of it as a person other than yourself describing something to you. Sometimes you want a lot of facts, sometimes you want a sketch so that you can fill it in yourself.
Examples: Her eyes shone in the light like those of a feline, glittering with the strange metallic shine that somehow manages to be lusturous and flat at the same time.
The sidewalk crumbled farther up the street, forming jagged lines and cracks, where little children sometimes tripped and fell, crying for their mothers to help them.
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These can both be subtely improved. Can you figure out how to combine the ideas, to shorten the image but still keep it intact?
Here's one way:
Her eyes glittered with a strange metallic feline shine, lusturous yet flat.
Further up the street, the sidewalk crumbled into jagged lines where little children sometimes tripped and fell, crying out to their mothers.
There are ways to condense what you say. It's really a matter of what the most important image is to you and to the story, and making sure it's not passive voice, unless you specifically desire it.
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