The Importance of Details in Your Writing

I hope everyone out there in blogland had a great holiday season (or a great December, if that's more your thing)!

I've been thinking a lot about worldbuilding recently. My husband and I are working through one of our favorite TV shows, Stargate SG-1, and we both keep commenting on how rich the world of the show seems.

Since my husband is a writer too, we inevitably started to analyze exactly what it was the writers were doing to make the show so interesting. We eventually broke it down to one main point.

Details.

This show is absolutely crammed with details. Because it's sci-fi, the protagonists are going to other planets and encountering other races and cultures. The writers sprinkle in little differences between those societies and our own (which may be as simple as an oddly shaped drinking glass, or a quick hand gesture when greeting a friend).

When I think over recent books I really enjoyed, I realize that they are all rich in detail. This doesn't just apply to sci-fi, either. I just finished a Regency romance that I couldn't put down, mostly because it included tidbits of everyday life during the time period, things I'd never read in other books. Part of the reason contemporary novels like Eleanor and Park resonate with readers is because the author includes the details of the characters' lives--the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, the way they react to things around them.

One great thing about including lots of details is that the technique helps avoid the dreaded infodump.

This happens when writers try to give a load of backstory very quickly and can be very off-putting for readers. Sprinkling details into your narrative is a much better way to hint at the differences between our world and the world of the story. 

For example, instead of coming out and saying there was a great war between our hero's nation and the neighboring one, why not have a character looking at someone's war medal? Or maybe show the wreckage of a building that was destroyed by enemy troops?

Of course, anything can be overdone. For an interesting discussion of what happens when you overdo it on the details, check out this blog post by author Kate Elliot on the Tor.com blog: The Status Quo Does Not Need World Building.

An Ode to Scrivener

If I were asked which tool I find most important for writing, my answer would be my laptop. Duh, right? But my second most important tool, the one that makes it possible for me to happily plan, outline, draft, and revise, isn't such a duh.

It's Scrivener, a word processing program from Literature and Latte.

Scrivener is for writing, first and foremost, but it's also a management system for research, notes, and drafts. Like many people, I used to make notes and outline on paper or on my computer and then type my pages and do my editing in Microsoft Word.

Now my writing process has changed. I do all of my drafting in Scrivener, and then I export my work to Word.

Scrivener has virtual notecards, so the first thing I do when I outline a new story is to enter a brief description of each scene. Here's a screenshot of the notecards for my current novel:

From this screen, I can move the cards around and check out the flow of the novel before I start writing a word.

Then comes the writing. Scrivener lets you break down the draft into bite-size chunks or scenes, which works fantastically well for me. Each scene has its own notecard (visible on the right side in the drafting view), and each scene can be grouped into a chapter folder.

I find this chunk-by-chunk method a great deterrent to writer's block. Knowing I'm sitting down to write a finite scene is so much easier than trying to face endless blank pages.

Scrivener is also great for editing. Before, I would save each new draft with a name like "LongTimers v3.28." I ended up with dozens of files and the job of remembering which one had that descriptive paragraph I cut but wanted to put back. But Scrivener has this awesome feature called snapshots. When the little camera button at the bottom right of the screen is pressed, it saves a draft that's linked to that scene. I can switch to other incarnations of the scene easily from the same page.

The program also has folders and files set up for notes and research, which is fantastic for speculative fiction writers. I have all of my character and worldbuilding notes organized in one place--alternate timelines, character bios and backstories, continuity notes, and science notes. I even have a file of ideas for possible future books.

My Notes section of the current novel. I've got a lot of stuff in here!

There are tons of features I haven't mentioned (the ability to set word count targets for daily writing, outline view, flags and markers that can be used to indicate character arcs or multiple POVs, to name a few).

But in the interests of space saving, I'll close with this: Scrivener is only $45, it's available for both Mac and PC, and there's a free 30-day trial offered on the Literature and Latte website. I don't have any affiliation with the site, but I'm a very satisfied user. Try it. I have a feeling you'll like it.