Writing Advice About Details

Are you the kind of reader who loves detailed  descriptions in books? Or do you hate long descriptive passages?

Chances are you're like me. You like enough details to create a visual image but not so many that they bog down a story.

WHY PUT DETAILS IN A BOOK? 

A young man asked me that once. He said he didn't like all those paragraphs of descriptions for places and people. He just wanted to jump into the story and read the action.

I suspect he was reading a book similar to one I had recently read where every noun seemed to have descriptive adjectives attached to them that it made reading the literary equivalent of  slogging through mud.    

I gave his question some thought and finally told him that details are what make books come alive for readers. It's the details about a character that make the character seem like a real person. It's the details about the setting that make the "world" those characters inhabit seem real.

WORD PICTURES

Those details about sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch—sensory details—create a picture of a person or place, and how those details are presented vary from author to author.

Anyone can say: "His eyes were blue." But to say: "His eyes were the deep blue of the ocean—the Antarctic Ocean—and just as frigid." That's a short example of a sensory detail that's attached to a bit of emotional observation from the viewpoint character.

I did tell the young man there were authors he might enjoy who used very little description—Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Robert B. Parker. There are others from the classics to present day. 

TAKEAWAY TRUTH

The best kind of description elicits a reaction of some sort in the reader and does this with the appropriate amount of words.

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