Getting Lost in the Details

At the risk of sounding redundant, it cannot be overstated that as a writer your work is often a reflection of you and who you are more than it demonstrates what you are trying to depict or portray through the articulation of your imagination. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than when it comes to the measure of directness that you employ in your personal life. When you interact with people on a day to day basis and they relate to you what is going on in their lives, it is often the case that a writer can by identified by the level of detail they will give you. Where readers tend to be direct and to the point, conscious of the energy they expend in relating their state of being, a writer tends toward the opposite end of the spectrum, elaborating on events with added detail that may even come to the point of rambling.

The art of writing is useful as a therapeutic device if for no other reason than the impetus that it places upon the writer to take their thoughts and structure them into something coherent, something that another person can take and be reasonably expected to follow. When it comes to my personal life I have always struggled with the ability to discern just how much detail someone wants me to give them; so much to the point where I will outright ask if they want a long answer or a short answer, the latter of which may be comically abrupt. By extension, when you get to know me as a person you learn very early not to ask me a question unless you want an honest answer. This is an understanding I make an effort to explicitly establish quite quickly when I meet people that want to get closer to me than a passing acquaintance. I have never been formally assessed as to whether I fall on the spectrum of Autism but it is something that I have suspected at times. I don't want to use that as an excuse for this behaviour, as I said I am conscious of the difficulty I have and I have developed coping mechanisms to find a balance in my life and be able to maintain relationships with others that are not invasive.

When you struggle to know how much detail a person wants from you in real life in a one on one conversation, this surfaces in your work, when you write, there is a balance to be found between your effort to detail what you see in your mind's eye with as much detail as you can, versus the need to leave some things to the imagination of the reader. My English teacher once said that a writer never answers every question, only those that are important to the progression of the story or to the development of the characters, you can spend fifteen pages giving an intricate description of a sunflower sat on a table in a scene where two characters are speaking, but if it's not relevant to the story there's no point in doing so. Of my published works to date, 'The Prince Of Shadows' serves as the best example of this obstacle for me. Several scenes in that work were much more vivid in my mind than what is depicted in the writing itself, I wanted to go into much more detail about the setting, but there was no story to be found in the detail that would have been given. To give an example, one of the palaces that is mentioned in the narrative is given some detail in the text itself but in planning and development of the story itself I drew out a floor plan, with dimensions of each room, their intended purpose, general colour palette, and artefacts included in each room. The bulk of this information was never included in the work itself, there was no reason conducive to the narrative for mentioning those details.

In many ways what is being discussed here is a referred to as a literary trope by the moniker "Chekhov's Gun" which asserts that if a gun is introduced into a scene then at some point it will be fired. Mentioning a gun in any scene that sits there throughout and is never used nor acknowledged by the characters can lead either to confusion on the part of the reader as they wonder why it was mentioned at all, or it can lead to boredom on the part of the reader as extensive details of a scene irrelevant to the narrative leave the reader exhausted and disinterested.

In practice almost nothing is ever as simple as a binary choice there is a third choice or middle ground to be found. That middle ground represents the balance of a writer demonstrated by their choice of what to include and what not to include. My own personal opinion on this matter, and the way I resolve this internal conflict is to "scratch" that mental itch by writing supporting documentation or additional content that is never included in the main narrative. As demonstrated by the palace floor plans mentioned above, further demonstrated by character profiles, character histories, family trees, abridged summaries of what has been written, outlines for ideas for character development, elements of story and ideas that have come to mind but are not full formed, and anything else I want to elaborate upon for my own benefit that does not fit into the main narrative. All this I write and retain as a reference and reflect upon it as I progress through a story so that even if they are never included in the work itself, the fact that it has been written out, structured, and organised into something coherent helps write a narrative that hints at greater depth.

To put it another way, many years ago a good friend named Ryan once said to me that I should give the reader more credit than I think they deserve, to leave things to their imagination, even if I know the answer, it doesn't mean I have to spell it out for the reader. That advice stuck with me over the years and I've used it not just in my writing but in my personal life too. There was a time when I would be open and honest about everything in my life that people asked about, that was perhaps motivated by naivety or as I alluded to before, the inability to tell when someone has a genuine interest versus making small talk or inquiring out of obligation or expectation. I've come to a point in my life now where I will answer what is asked of me directly but if people don't dig then I don't offer information. I've tried to live by the assumption that if someone really wants to know they will ask, and if they don't ask then they don't want to know. That might not be the healthiest mentality to live your life by, but through therapy I have come to realise that coping mechanisms on their own out of context don't always stand as healthy behaviours, but as the sayings go, "needs must as the Devil drives", and "the Devil is in the detail" - and for now, it works for me at least.