Writer's Workshop: The Laws of Details · 10:33pm Jun 10th, 2016
There are two different writers battling in our heads: the mad genius who wants to write a six-million word epic, and the lazy genius who wants to do as little work as possible. You can write like J. R. R. Tolkien, all full of flowery descriptions and thoughtful details, or you can be Ernest Hemingway, with as few words as you need to get your point across. Putting detail into your stories is certainly not an exact science, but there are a few rules and tricks you can keep in mind to make sure how much detail you use and where are most effective. Starting with...
1. The Law of Conservation of Detail. That's what TVTropes calls it, anyway. Basically, the more detail you describe something with relative to other objects, the more important it appears to be. For example, compare these two descriptions together:
The living room was quiet. Inside was a small table, a soft couch where Adelaide and Tristan were sitting, a floor lamp, and a large 19th-century rifle used during the Napoleonic Wars, still functional despite the rust and wear of time, resting above the mantle.
The living room was a testament to older times. The table was a varnished mahogany dating back to at least the 16th century, the couch where Adelaide and Tristan were sitting could have fit right at home in an Enlightenment-era salon, and the rifle above the mantle was a 19th-century rifle used during the Napoleonic Wars, still functional despite the wear and tear of time.
Which of the two is better? Again, that's not really the right question. What matters is that, in the first example, the gun seems really important. It's the only object in the room that gets more than one word to describe it. In the second, it's not quite as clear what's important. I've created a tone for the entire room, and each object within it feels equally important. If there was one thing that was the "most" important, it'd be the room itself, since everything within it is "detail" for it. Ultimately, you can't spend the whole story describing every single rock, tree, and blade of grass around, so you'll have to decide what's important and what's not. Some things will sound like the first paragraph, while others will sound like the second.
2. The Law of Importance; or, Chekov's Gun. You don't think I used a gun example for nothing, did you? The way it's usually quoted is something like this: "If you describe a gun in the first act, it needs to be fired in the second." In other words, if you use a lot of detail to introduce an object, setting, or person, that should eventually come back to have some plot effect later in the story. Subconsciously, we log each of the things you bring up; once you use them for their proper purpose, we get so excited! "A-ha!" we think. "I remember that!"
Of course, if it's too obvious, it won't work. You see this a lot in the show, like in "Bridle Gossip." Why does Spike spend so much time showing Twilight a random book, which she immediately rejects? It's so obvious that book is important. The way I see it, you've got three options: you can make an object seem important, but ultimately not mean anything. That's the Red Herring approach. Effective, but makes your audience feel kind of disappointed. Alternatively, you can take an object you didn't trump up and make it important. This can be really fun, as it makes your audience watch more closely, but also means they'll start to trump up everything, no matter how small, and you'll get more Red Herrings than you did before. It's the third option that I think has the best mileage: take a Gun you've already used and use it again. TVTropes calls this "Chekov's Boomerang." Let me see if I can give an example. Imagine a gun sitting on a mantle. In the second act, the Main Character picks it up and threatens someone with it in a climactic scene. During the fight, the gun clatters onto the ground, and it seems like it's served its purpose. But then, in the third act, you have another climactic fight in the same room, and during the scuffle, one of the characters picks the gun up from where it fell and fires it again. That will really shock your readers!
3. The Law of Time. You probably don't think of this when you're reading, but it's an instinctual system. "The longer it takes to read a segment, the more time the reader will assume has passed." Basically, narration is supposed to imitate thought, so if there's a lot of narration, assumedly the characters are standing around thinking. This is another limitation to the first two rules I just described; you can't spend more time describing a scene than the characters would spend looking at it. Too much detail, and your characters will seem to be frozen in space. Here, look at these two examples:
His foot slipped on a piece of ice, and he slammed into the ground.
His foot slipped on a slick, near-invisible piece of ice, shimmering in the late evening sunlight, with uneven protuberances matching the coal-black asphalt beneath it. He fell towards the ground in a parabolic arc, and he flailed his arms in a wild attempt to call someone to his aid or to grab some kind of safety, but to no avail.
Seriously, how long does it take him to hit the ground?! The second one feels like he's falling slow-motion, which doesn't make sense if it's a sudden, unexpected movement. On the other hand, if you wanted to make it seem like his life was flashing before his eyes, this might be the way to go.
4. The Law of Utility; or, Sanderson's First Law of Magic. Sanderson's wording goes like this: "An author's ability to solve conflicts with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic." Put more broadly, the more details you offer to the reader, the more things you can accomplish with those details. Sanderson's goal here is with magic, but this can be with anything, really. If you share parts of a world's culture, you can then use that culture in the characters' dialogues. If you describe certain objects in a person's house, you can then have the characters interact with those objects later. This may sound obvious, but it can really help you if your story is in a bind. If you can't figure out a way for the characters to solve a scene, or if you don't know what needs to happen next for you to get from point A to point B, maybe you need to go back and describe something in more detail.
Me, I'm not always thinking in terms of details so much as "rules." I find stories really interesting when the characters have to manage multiple sets of rules together. I've been watching this show, "The Room," where the main character has a special key that can open doors to anywhere. But it has to be a specific type of door, and people that go through it when they're not holding the key have different rules than if they have the key on them, and the person holding the key attracts other people with similar objects, and... okay, I'll stop. My point is, once you get all these rules and details interacting with each other, you have a lot of potential to solve unusual problems. Choose interesting, multifaceted details that give you room to work with them, and you'll have tons of possibilities available to you!
Well, I hope those are useful to you. Whether you like going for pages about the color patterns on a vase, or if you prefer being as terse as you can, these rules should help you focus on important details, bring useful things to the fore, convey time accurately, and give you new methods of problem-solving. Give them a shot as you plan; if I'm right, they'll take you far!
These overviews of the different laws are good: they explain things concisely and effectively.
I think that the issue with a lot of these laws, however, is that their execution is more difficult to understand than their definition. They are intentionally broad guidelines, and that means the fine details of putting them in to practice has a lot of exceptions and vagaries (like any artistic guideline).
There's also the caveat that regardless of how long an author spends describing something, and no matter how important it is, there is an upper limit where it becomes boring. Like you said, person's jacket may have a critical impact on the plot, but one can only read about the type and nature of the jacket for so many words before it becomes boring. This is where the idea of infodumping/exposition and conservation of detail often engage in prosaic fisticuffs.
But obviously, all the varied exceptions and caveats are beyond the scope of this blog.