Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Significant Details and Set Dressing

One of the little twitches I have when I'm revising a novel is that I will mercilessly go through and cut out everything that's not essential to the story. Part of this is just to clean up after my first draft. I like to throw odd things in that strike my fancy while drafting ("maybe the two big guys are actually twins, and I can do something with the idea of twins later on!" or "maybe Fredrik has one leg shorter than the other, and I can do something with that later on!") and see if they develop, and sometimes they become gorgeous symbols and set pieces and sometimes they're just rubbish I need to clear off the page later.

What this means is that at some point during my revisions process, I have a fairly tight narrative with no extraneous material in it. Which is a good thing, to a point. There is a danger--always realized in my case, I think--that all of the cool details that make the fictional world a rich experience for the reader are removed, because the number and type of buttons on someone's gloves is not a significant detail so I have cut it out, just as I have cut out the discussion of the tightness of the wood grain on the arm of a chair, and other things. Which leaves me with a sort of empty world, where characters are floating a bit in a vacuum. I don't know why I do this every time, but I do.

I am forced then to go back into the novel for another round of revisions, putting in all the details of the fictional world that I've removed. I pause to note that it's never quite so extreme as I'm making it here; possibly I only cut out about half of the details of setting and place and appearance that I put in during the first draft, but it seems like a lot to me. Anyway, I am currently in this stage of revisions with my novel Killing Hamlet, and I have always sort of disliked this stage of the process. I have felt that, in a way, I am betraying my own rules about a proper narrative by larding up my prose with stuff that the story can live without. But I also want my story to have the flavor of the time and place, without the level of detail found in novels of the historical fiction genre, where things can be--in my opinion--a bit excessive, reading like a catalogue or an encyclopedia.

Last night I was weaving in little bits of trivia about 16th-century beliefs regarding the planets in our solar system, just a sentence or two here and there through the novel (the protagonist is an astronomer/astrologer), and it occurred to me that I was not choking up my story with unnecessary detail so much as I was going around the house I'd built and furnished and putting flower arrangements and objets d'art in the rooms. Mighty Reader makes sure we have fresh flowers year round, and I have no complaints about how pretty this makes our house, and were the flowers to go away, I'd miss them awfully much. So I have decided that this is what I'm doing with my book, and that it's a good thing, as long as I don't pile in so many bouquets that you can no longer see my characters.

Anyway, and I stipulate in advance that "it's all in the execution," but what are your thoughts about details that are only in the story as set dressing, as props? I have railed against them in the past on this very blog, but I'm older and more mellow and, frankly, a bit tired today. But how much is enough, or too much, and when in the writing process do you put them in, and how much do you remove? Et cetera.

18 comments:

  1. I think these details are especially important in a historical novel, to paint a rich picture for the reader to imagine. Even if certain details aren't relevant to the story, if they help pull the reader into a setting that is foreign to the one we live in, it really does help set the mood and pull us into a different world.

    And I agree with about striking a balance between leaving the rooms bare and obstructing the view. I have beta readers help me out with this balance, and I also just read through the text aloud to see if I'm getting bogged down or stumbling over any of the non-functional details. If they flow into the narrative just fine, I leave them, because I like rich, transporting sensory imagery to pull me deep into a story.

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  2. I may well be in a phase of extreme self-rejection, because I used to be quite an elaborate set-dresser, but I find myself cutting, cutting, and cutting some more.

    Partly, though, I also think it depends on the type of story you're writing. My stories these days really take place in the minds and emotions of my characters, and so external details that do not contribute directly to character development or moving the plot along really do feel like barnacles.

    I do try to give enough description of people and their appearance to allow for characterization. I try to give a basic sense of place so that the characters actions make sense, but that's about it.

    If I were writing something that took place in another world, at another times, or that might have a more external drive, I might strive to hit a more moderated point such as you describe.

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  3. I think they have to serve a purpose: setting, tone, characterization. If it doesn't, I can it.

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  4. Genie: My idea of good historical fiction is A.S. Byatt's 19th-century half of Possession, where the details don't get in the way at all, and aren't highlighted to show off Byatt's research. "If they flow into the narrative just fine, I leave them" is pretty much how I feel about it, too. If (for example) the proper period name of some object doesn't work within my overall sense of rhythm and syllable stress, I'll use some other noun, because the integrity of the prose comes first for me. Though sometimes I'll build the sentence (or the paragraph) around the sound of that one bizarre word because I fall in love with historical terms easily. Specialist terminology appeals to me as well; right now I'm trying to wean myself off of nautical terminology because there is an important scene that takes place on a ship and I had to resist naming all the parts of the ship because I love the words so much.

    Nevets: I think that even internal stories can benefit from a concrete, real-world detail or two. They give the reader a place to stand.

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  5. @Scott - I do agree with you, and I hope that I give them enough, but it's a struggle to get myself to put them in there. Largely, I think, because I don't want to go back to being the old me.

    @Elizabeth - I'm going to shoot myself in the foot here by saying that I think there's too strong a wave in contemporary literature of "setting, tone, characterization," or my own words, "character development" and "moving the plot along."

    I do thing that description and detail are as valid a component of any story as are character, action, theme, and plot. As with any other element, it should be used carefully and intentionally and it must be executed skilfully, but I do believe it serves it own very important role in the story experience.

    Now I am talking out of both sides of my mouth...

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  6. Very interesting post, Scott. I have strong opinions about details. People always compliment me on my details, which is nice. I spend a lot of time on them. I also end up cutting about half of them out of drafts. Or...depending on the book, more than half of them out. For Cinders I kept in a lot of the details. For Monarch I have taken many of them out to give it a more sparse, faster flow for the narrative, which I think it needs.

    It depends on the book for me, but I try to keep only details in if they help the story and don't get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish. I put in a lot of details in my first drafts because those details help transport me, the writer, into the world to better understand it and tell the story.

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  7. Oh, and this will be a huge, huge topic of discussion for me when we discuss Tinkers.

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  8. Thurber says that people are either "putter-inners" or "taker-outers." I'm generally a "taker-outer," though lately I find myself wanting to write more expansive narratives, with more room to breathe and more to look at, in a manner of speaking. Which will be interesting when I set out to write the next book, half of which is set on an ice floe off of Antarctica. The other half is set in New York in 1914-15, so there should be plenty of interesting things to see during those bits. But again, I'm more of an impressionist than a photorealist.

    Michelle: I think the level of detail in "Cinders" worked well. I await my chance to see the official version of "Monarch."

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  9. Michelle: Yeah, Tinkers and details. I will be interested to see if Big D sees any similarity between Harding's writing and that of Proust.

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  10. Scott, I cringe daily at the thought of you reading that other draft from two revisions ago. Oh well. You at least can see how I've improved with revisions and a professional editor. :)

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  11. I'm actually distracted by these details, unless they stand for some mirror of the character's flaw.

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  12. lakeviewer: Do you mean that every detail must be symbolic and related directly to the protagonist?

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  13. I think I've been pretty minimal in my use of details. But, I do seem to include more these days than I allowed myself before. Now, I use my gut to decide what stays and what doesn't. If it just feels like a detail to make things fuller, I cut. If it's a detail that gets me excited (for whatever reason, not necessarily the plot) then I keep it.

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  14. Comparing Harding and Proust is an interesting thought. I'm working hard to keep my mouth shut for now.

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  15. Big D: I realized today that the details I'm adding in are all to expand the personality of the narrator, to show the reader the things about the world that the protagonist would think important. So it all comes back to character. About which, huh. I wonder how I'll think about this when I revise Cocke & Bull.

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  16. I am really struggling with this balance right now.

    My story is told from an omnipotent perspective and seems to rely a lot of dialogue and reflection. For me, set dressing is now crucial as otherwise the entire story would be a script.

    It's just making it all fit - that's the difficult part.

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  17. I like what Michelle said about using the details to transport herself into the story. I enjoy historical works when I get a sense that the writer is simply "there" and sharing the experience from the character's perspective.

    IMO readers enjoy using their imaginations to fill in whatever small gaps might be left. So regarding Scott's flower and art analogy my feeling is that a little goes a long way. After all, an authentic character isn't going to go around categorizing everything. They live in this world and it is all perfectly natural and real to them. We don't need to know which bulbs produce which flowers or which kind of mulch they need. We just want the effect.

    And how does a writer know when the picture they are painting is having the desired impact? Like Domey mentioned, I would guess that the best writers can rely on their guts, their instincts, and just focus on telling the story. I can always tell when a writer is trying too hard and it makes me cringe both out of pity and annoyance.

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  18. Miss Sharp: I agree entirely that authentic characters would take it for granted that whoever they're talking to will have the same frame of reference, in a historical fiction, that is. So my narrator (the story I'm working on is set in 1601) won't explain what a doublet is, or that printed books are expensive and generally writ in Latin and that most people in Europe are illiterate and that a "closet" is a sleeping chamber. If he wouldn't say it in real life, I don't let him say it in the novel.

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