Insignificant Detail

Anton Chekhov was a Russian writer who is best known for his short works of fiction.  He is also known for the advice and remarks he shared for those who intend to develop this craft themselves.  Amongst the many pieces of advice that he is attributed, none is more synonymous than the trope for which he is the namesake - Chekhov's Gun.  This trope simply put states that if a detail is included in a piece of fiction it must be relevant to the plot and to the story, if it is not, it should not be included.  This is explained by a hypothetical gun, for which the trope is named.  If you are to include detail in a piece of fiction that there is a loaded gun placed in the scene, then that gun must later be used in the the scene or subsequent scenes, otherwise it is irrelevant to even mention it.

Whilst this advice serves writers well when writing short stories which the reader inherently understands will not be as in depth as a full length work, the advice does not stand up when it comes to longer works.  The reason this is the case is because there is an expected level of detail from the writer in order for the reader to become immersed and believe the environment could exist.  This requires the writer to add details about the environment, most of which will never come into play as the story progresses.

To put it another way, when you read a work of fiction you are limited in what you can picture of the environment by what the writer tells you of that environment.  When you watch a video based production you are limited in your perception of the environment by what is exchanged between characters and what the set designers have included in the set that can be seen on-screen.  The level of detail you incorporate into a written work as opposed to a visual work is comparable to that of the effort undertaken by the set designer.  In short, your writing needs to dress a hypothetical set in the mind of the reader so they know where the characters are.  Omission of this entirely would lead to piece of work that was hard to follow or lacked depth.  There is therefore a balance to be found between the two approaches, between what is essential, and what adds depth.  The bare necessity approach only works in short story writing.

If you were to take this mentality and apply it to life itself, you would argue that nothing in life is ever down to chance, and that everything has a purpose.  You would be able to argue that every single detail you can perceive is relevant, and that you should pay attention to everything that you possibly can.  This of course is not possible to do in life, for a start the mental capacity needed to undertake such an endeavour would be immense.  In addition, the human brain is not designed to function in this way.  At any given time when you are watching or observing something, for the most part your brain is simply showing you what it thinks you are seeing, it doesn't process the visual input constantly.  Your vision in reality has a frame rate and in between frames your brain is filling in the gaps by rendering what it approximates to be the interim animations.  This frame rate is not constant, it fluctuates based on how much attention your brain thinks it needs to pay, and even at that this is not determined by conscious effort - intending to take in as much detail as you can won't actually produce that result.

If you want to increase the amount of detail you perceive, it becomes necessary to experience the observation multiple times, each time picking an element to focus on.  To this end your brain will add new levels of detail, like painting a wall with a roller, each pass adding more paint, until you have an even coating.  The only drawback to this approach is that your brain constantly works against you by evaluating predictability and using that metric as a deciding factor in what you perceive.  As a writer this can be demonstrated by the act of writing and missing mistakes you make whilst writing, and missing those mistakes when proof reading.  You know the content before you write, and in writing you transfer the content into the media you are working with, and when reading it back or observing it your brain predicts what it should say, the result being that you read what you think you wrote as opposed to what you actually wrote, leading you to miss the mistakes, even if you proof it several times.  The only way to overcome this in the end is to have someone else proof it or to leave it long enough that the content has become sufficiently degraded in your short term memory that you actually have to read it to follow it.

The challenge in life is the same as the challenge when writing, you need to know what details are relevant, what are insignificant, and ultimately what details are actually being presented to you as opposed to what you are convincing yourself you are seeing.