Category: flow

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope you’re all prepared for tonight. And may the gods have mercy on those of you who aren’t…

Let’s talk about scary movies for a moment.

If you aren’t familiar, there was a long-running movie series called Resident Evil based off the long running game series of the same name, which also spawned a series of animated movies. But we’re talking about the live action ones. Well, the original live-action ones.

Specifically, I’d like to talk with you about the first one, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Rather than base the movie directly off the game story, Anderson decided to use lots of elements from the game with all-new characters. This gave him a lot more freedom in how he told the story, and let him structure the film for a general audience instead of specifically for fans of the game.

That structure is what I wanted to talk about. If you’ve been following the ranty writing blog for a while, you know I love pointing out how well this movie uses flashbacks. Seriously, it’s amazing. The movie’s pretty much a masterclass in how to do flashbacks well in a story. They all serve a clear purpose. They all advance either the plot or the story (often both). They all fit within the narrative and linear structure of the story. And none of them create fake-tension situations that are undermined by the present. You can read more about my rules-of-thumb for flashbacks right here, if you like.

So I figured, since it’s Halloween and all, I’d walk through these flashbacks one by one and show you how and why they’re so effective.

Now, you’re going to get a lot more out of this little rant if you’ve seen the movie. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s seasonal, it’s fun, it’s much more of an action-horror film than a gorefest. I don’t know if it’s streaming free anywhere, but I think you can rent it most places for three or four bucks? Also, kind of goes without saying but there are going to be some unavoidable spoilers in this discussion so… be warned.

Here’s a brief refresher for those of you who haven’t seen it in a while (or are just determined to go on without seeing it)…

Resident Evil begins with a few quick minutes showing the lab accident that kicks off everything before the lab goes into a drastic lockdown mode that seems to kill, well, everyone. And after that we’re with our heroine, Alice, who wakes up naked and wet on the floor of a bathroom, half-draped in a shower curtain and suffering from near-complete amnesia. Very quickly she learns she’s part of a security detail guarding a hidden entrance to the Hive, a massive underground lab/ testing facility operated by the multinational, multibillion dollar Umbrella Corporation. And the lab accident earlier has set a very nasty bioweapon loose down there, the T-virus, which has had, politely, some effects on the researchers and other staff members.

And we’ll stop there for now.

So let’s talk flashbacks. I’ll try to go over all of them and give you a little context for each one. I’m also going to mention where they are so if you’re actually doing your homework, you can skim around in the movie and find them.

Our first one shows up a little over nine minutes in. Alice has woken up, staggered to the bathroom mirror, and is staring at her reflection when this flashback kicks in for a few seconds. She was in the shower, there was a vent, her eyes rolled up, and she collapsed, dragging the shower curtain down with her.

So this first one does a few things. It tells us right up front Alice didn’t pass out she was knocked out—this is something that was done to her, not something that just happened. It also establishes her flashbacks are very distinct from the “present’ story line in the movie—they’re in overexposed black and white, with echoey sound and a fast cut, glitchyquality that helps sell her fragmented memory. And it fits story-wise. This is something she’s focused on and trying to remember, so it makes sense we’re seeing this and not, y’know, last night’s dinner or something.

Also worth noting Alice’s reactions after this flashback because it’s very clear this is all the information she got from this sparked memory. She still doesn’t know who or where she is, or what’s going on. This is going to hold for all the flashbacks—she doesn’t get anything “extra” out of them. She sees what we see.

Our next flashback comes at eighteen minutes in. Alice has been taken with the security team to the underground train that leads to the Hive, and they’ve found an unconscious man on board. Alice stares at the man’s face and flashes back to her and him together and happy. Again, just quick flashes. Her in a gown, him in a tux, laughing, posing for photos together.

Worth noting that Alice had also seen a wedding photo of her and said man a few minutes earlier, and this flashback pretty much explains where that photo came from. It also connects the two for the audience—the man here now on the floor of the train (we’ll learn his name is Spence and he’s also suffering from gas-induced amnesia) is the man we saw earlier in photos. Whoever he is, Alice has a definite history with him.

Which brings us to the third flashback. Maybe 22 minutes in now. It’s mostly a recap of the first one as the security team commander explains what’s actually going on here and gets everyone up to speed. So as he’s explaining the computerized security systems and known side effects of the gas (short-term amnesia), we see Alice get gassed in the shower again—this time with an extra few shots to show us how the vents are hidden away in the walls.

So this one’s a little more structural—it’s a quick reminder for the audience. It emphasizes things are run by the computer (some of you know where that’s going). It’s giving us a bit more information about how thing are hidden and automated in Umbrella facilities.

Our fourth flashback happens three or four minutes later (just shy of 26 minutes in). We’re in the Hive now, and Spence offers Alice his leather jacket to keep warm. It’s the first time they’ve actually touched and it sets off a bunch of memories for Alice. Really specific ones showing she and Spence knew each other. Like, y’know… knew each other. Physically. As was the style at the time.

And that means now Alice knows something about Spence. He’s clearly someone she has a history with, and a history that involved, well, a degree of sharing and trust between them. As always, she doesn’t remember anything else, but it’s enough that she clearly decides he’s someone she can trust.

Notice the pattern here so far. All four of these flashbacks barely add up to fifteen seconds. They’re not slowing anything down. They’re all related to the actual events going on and the information the movie’s giving us (and Alice). And every one of them tells us something new—there’s very, very little noise. They all keep advancing out knowledge of the plot or the characters.

The next flashback doesn’t happen for almost half an hour—there’s a lot of action going on and dropping in a flashback would just disrupt the flow of things. Then around the 53 minute mark, Alice saves Matt from a zombie that’s attacking him and she recognizes this zombie. We get our longest flashback yet (almost ten seconds!)– Alice and this woman meeting in a deserted graveyard, where Alice is offering her access to the T-virus, Umbrella access codes, surveillance plans… for a price.

So… this one does a bunch of stuff. It’s suddenly casting Alice’s real goals and loyalties into question (at a point when she still can’t even remember them). It’s showing us she was part of a larger story than just the current events going on in the Hive, and making it clear Umbrella has been a questionable company for a while now. It’s also a nice reminder all these zombies were actual people—people we saw back at the start of this doing their jobs, chatting, drinking coffee, and just living their own lives.

And it doesn’t help that shortly after this Matt tells Alice the mystery woman was his sister. The two of them were gathering information to expose Umbrella’s illegal, unethical practices. His sister had found someone who could get them all the information they needed to get out with the evidence… but whoever it was they betrayed her. So now this flashback has Alice really questioning herself—and us questioning her, too. Amnesia-Alice seems great, but maybe if she had all her memories…?

Now, something happens around 70 minutes in that’s worth mentioning. Alice gets some memories back but it’s not set up as a flashback. It’s not in blown-out black and white. It’s not glitchy. And she’s not part of it. She just suddenly recognizes an area of the Hive they’re in and pictures it up and running and full of people. And she remembers what should be in a nearby lab– the cure for the T-virus.

I think this is worth noting because by breaking the flashback format here, the movie’s showing us that things are changing. Alice is getting more solid memories, and they’re appearing more solid because of that. The flashbacks are a clever device and being used well, but things are moving past the point of needing them and trying to force this particular bit of information into that format could actually be distracting at this point. And we never want our flashbacks to be distracting. Also, this scene is a little longer and somewhat talky but it’s happening at a time when our main story has slowed down a bit. Again, it isn’t messing with our flow.

So… moving on. One final flashback, and it happens just two minutes after the last one. They find the lab with the cure and it’s gone. The vault is empty. And as our heroes look around the lab trying to find some clue what might’ve happened to it… Spence has a flashback. And it’s a big one.

Turns out Spence was spying on that meeting in the graveyard, and he decided to steal the T-virus first. And almost 2/3 of his flashback is… the very beginning of the movie. All seen from his point of view. Spence caused the lab accident! Deliberately! To cover his theft.

(fun fact—if you freeze frame at the three minute mark in the very beginning, you can actually see it’s Spence right then! At 3:02, to be exact)

So, what does this last flashback do? It tells us what really happened to cause the lab accident. It reveals Spence as one of our main villains all along. And it firmly establishes that Alice, with or without her memories, is our hero—we find out her “price” for giving Matt’s sister all this evidence is that they use it to destroy the Umbrella Corporation.

Again, new information given in a way that adds to the tension, doesn’t slow down the pace of the actual story, doesn’t undermine anything.

See what I mean? Seven flashbacks in a movie that’s barely a hundred minutes. And heck, really all of them are in the first seventy minutes or so. And every one of them works for both the narrative and linear structure. Every one of them gives us information that’s relevant to “now.”

That’s some good zombie flashbacks.

Next time, I’d like to talk about how long all this takes.

Until then… well, enjoy Halloween.

And then go write.

Revisiting an older post with a Halloween themed post! Sort of! But still with lots of thoughts and (hopefully) informative tips and hints.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you are familiar with The Twilight Zone. It’s one of those lightning in a bottle things that people have tried to re-create again and again over the years. I think we’re up to… three remake series? And the movie?

During the ‘80s revival, they did a story called “To See The Invisible Man” (adapted by Stephen Barnes from an old Robert Silverberg short story). It’s about a man in a somewhat-utopian society whose asshole behavior gets him sentenced to a year of “public invisibility.” Key thing though…

They don’t actually turn him invisible. He just gets a small sort of implant-mark on his forehead that tells everyone to ignore him. That’s the curse of it. Everyone can see and hear him–and he knows they can– but no one’s allowed to react to him or anything he does. Even when he desperately needs to be acknowledged (I remember an eerie scene in a hospital emergency room after he’s been hit by a car), people just all pretend he’s not there. Even though they know he is.

Why do I bring this up?

In a weird way, this story’s kind of a metaphor for being a writer. The reader absolutely knows I’m there, that I’ve created this story, made up these characters, and chosen these individual words. But at the same time… they don’t want to admit that. They want to get caught up in the flow and immerse themselves in the story and pretend for an hour or an afternoon or a commute home that all of this is real. That it’s just them and the characters and the plot and I’m… not there. Not part of it.

It’s just my opinion, but I think one of the worst things a writer can do is draw attention to themselves in their writing. We need to be invisible. I mean, we want our characters to be seen. We want our dialogue to be heard. We want our action and passion and suspense to leave people breathless. But us—the writers? We’re just distractions. Less of us is more of the story. Being able to restrain myself is usually just as impressive as how excessive i could be.

So here are some ways not to be seen.

Vocabulary— A fair amount of would-be writers are determined to prove they’re cleverer than everyone else. More often than not, they latch onto (or look up) obscure and flowery words because they don’t want to use something “common” in their literary masterpiece. These folks write sprawling, impenetrable prose and all too often they’ll try to defend this habit by saying it’s the reader’s fault for having such a limited vocabulary. After all, I can easily picture a glabrous man in habiliments of titian and atramentous, not my fault you’re so basic.

Any word I’m choosing just to draw attention, to prove I don’t need to use a common word, is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but when my reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and decides to put the book down and go get caught up on Haunted Hotel… well, there’s only one person to blame. And it’s not them.

Complication— This is kind of like the vocabulary issue. Sometimes folks try to prove how clever or artistic they are by creating overly-elaborate sentences or structuring their whole narrative in a needlessly complicated way. I mean, I once tried to read a book with—no joke—a three-page opening sentence. Yes, sentence.

If I have an actual reason for doing this sort of thing in this piece of writing, fantastic. But if not… why would I do something that makes my readers more and more aware they’re reading a book rather than letting them get immersed in it? My writing should be clean, simple, and natural.

Said— I just talked about this recently so I won’t spend a lot of time on it here, but said is invisible. People skim over said on the page. It’s fantastic that I know a hundred other dialogue tags, but save them for when they matter. If every single tag is the special one, then none of them are special. So I shouldn’t draw attention to myself with twenty different descriptors on the page when I could just use said.

Names. If I use them in moderation, names are invisible. They’re just shorthand for the mental image of a character. But any name that repeats too often becomes the name we see everywhere and then it becomes noise distracting my readers from, y’know, the things I’m actually trying to show them. When Dot talks to Bob and Bob talks to Dot and Dot calls Bob by name and Bob calls Dot by name and then Bob and Dot… I mean, personally I start flinching a bit at that point.

Y’see, Timmy, every time I make the reader hesitate or pause for a second, I’m breaking the flow of the story. I’m encouraging them to skim at best, put the manuscript down at worst. I never want my reader thinking about how much they’re enjoying the latest Peter Clines book—I don’t even want them to think about the fact that they’re reading. I just want them to be immersed in this world alongside Noah, Parker, Olivia, Sam, Josh, the Castaway, Ross, Dieter, Neith, and all the rest.

If I’m the one they’re looking at, something’s gone wrong.

Next time… I thought I’d stick with the Halloweenish theme and do something I’ve threatened you all with for a long time now. I’m going to talk about Resident Evil. A lot.

Oh! And this coming Tuesday night I’m going to be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego talking with Eric Heisserer about his fantastic new crime procedural-reincarnation book Simultaneous. You should stop by and check it out.

(and do your homework– go watch Resident Evil)

Until then, go write.

Holy crap, things have been a mess for me. Copyedits on two different projects and notes on two other projects. My mom visiting. Me getting sick. My partner getting really sick. My beloved Goblin needed eye surgery, with two appointments leading up to that. Oh, crap, and WonderCon was in there too.

And meanwhile, the ranty writing blog sits neglected for almost two months. Unloved. Gathering dust…

Yes. Very sad. Anyway…

I got a request on an older rant about two months back, so I’m going to skip my planned topic and answer that. Because I read all the comments. And I answer all the questions. Plus let’s face it, it’s been so long you’ve forgotten what I’d said I was going to talk about anyway, didn’t you?

Jared wanted to know–

“How do you handle a character ‘thinking’ or carrying on with an inner monologue? With my current story my main character has a good bit of that going on and I seem to be stuck on treating it like regular dialogue. Does that take your reader out of a story?”

Okay. This is going to be a bit loose on hard facts because there’s a few different ways to approach this and there’s no right way to do something in fiction. I think there’s definitely wrong ways to do thing, but they’re pretty few and far between. Usually. Some people are very creative.

To begin, how we do thoughts in fiction depends a lot on what format our story’s taking. F’r example…

In first person, the narrative is essentially already in my character’s head. In a way, everything is their thoughts. The whole story. So even when there’s no dialogue, we’re aware that it’s still the character’s voice and viewpoint. Just like this. None of this is written as dialogue, and you understand I’m not speaking, but at the same time you also immediately understand all of this is my thoughts about writing. So in first person, I don’t have to do anything special to signify my characters thoughts because… well, it’s all thoughts. Done.

Plus side, thoughts in first person are very easy. Down side, it’s a little trickier for the character to surprise us because… well, we know what they’re thinking. And it can feel a bit cheaty if they suddenly don’t think of something. I’ve read books where, in chapter thirty, we find out the character did a bunch of stuff in chapter twenty that they just… never mentioned? And never thought about.

If I was going to do something like this—and again, this is just me, it might not work for you—I’d probably do something to let my readers know the character did something while still leaving the question of, y’know, what exactly they did. Maybe something like–

I made three phone calls, sent a text message to Dot, and then I went out to meet Mendoza and get my cat back.

Also, another big thing I need to keep track of in first person (in my opinion) is if this is a present tense or past tense story. Is my character having these thoughts and observations in real time, so to speak, or are they remembering past events and the thoughts they had then (with whatever additional commentary that might involve)? This’ll require a distinction between the thoughts “at the time” and the present day thoughts. Again, maybe something like–

I remember staring at him, thinking there was no way Wakko could be this stupid. But as I was going to learn all too soon, he was way stupider that I possibly could’ve imagined.

Also, worth mentioning that if I’m not careful, this past-present view can sometimes lead to tricky situations of what my character knew when, which can also create some possibly cheaty situations (see above). But it could also lead to some very clever storytelling.

If I do it right.

Next there’s third person perspective. This tends to come in two forms—omniscient and limited. Omniscient is when we can see everything in the story, including what’s going on in people’s heads. Which means we can see in his head, but also her head, and also his head. Okay, maybe not his head. That might give too much away.

Although that brings up a good point we should address right out of the gate. Third person omniscient can sometimes lead to what my beloved calls head-hopping. It’s when the narrative gets a bit loose and goes from my thoughts to your thoughts to her thoughts over to his thoughts (no, wait, we said we weren’t showing his thoughts) and back to my thoughts. If that sentence was a little hard to follow… well, you see where I’m going with this. Once we’re jumping into the heads of multiple characters, we’ve essentially created the same situation as a multi-person conversation. Except here people could be thinking of… well, anything. I’m thinking about those new Monster Force action figures, you’re thinking about college tuition, she’s trying to figure out if someone killed the Viscountess Maria for the inheritance or for revenge, and he’s thinking about ha ha ha thought you were finally going to find out what he’s thinking about, weren’t you? Well you’re not. That’d spoil everything.

So first, you can see how confusing that would get. Second, when we start jumping around and seeing everyone’s thoughts… it kind of brings everything to a halt. Yes, thoughts happen very fast in our heads and yes I can make it clear they’re all happening at the same time, but my readers still have to work through that page (or more) waiting for the characters to start doing something again. And meanwhile that ninja cheerleader’s just hanging there in the air with her sword raised…

The other version of this is third person limited. This is what I tend to use in most of my books. Whole sections of the book are essentially done over the shoulder of one specific character and no one else. We only “see” things that happen around this character and their thoughts are the only ones we have access to. The book I finished two months ago is almost entirely limited to one character’s viewpoint except for half a dozen chapters near the end (why? You’ll find out next year, if all goes well).

(pause for deep breath)

Now, within these formats, there’s a few different things I could do if I wanted to distinguish thoughts from general narration

Which means it’s time to talk about the tilted elephant in the room. Italics.

For a long time italics were the standard format for my character is thinking this, but as of late… it feels like we’re not seeing it as much. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong, but it definitely feels like it’s going out of fashion. I know I’m not using it as much, although that might mean this whole paragraph is just my own style-bias leaking through. But I think if you skimmed through a few more recent books, you wouldn’t see a lot of italics for thoughts.

There’s nothing weird about this. Storytelling conventions fall in and out of style all the time. Something can be the standard for ages, someone comes up with a different way of doing it, and suddenly that becomes the new standard everyone uses. Like thought bubbles in comic books. Remember those?

I think there are a few reasons italics-as-thoughts have fallen a bit out of favor, but the big one is probably that… well, through the years, italics sort of became the fallback go-to for everything in printed text. Thinking? Italics. Foreign language? Italics. Book or movie title? Italics. Emphasis? Italics! Character who can transform into pure energy and speaks by energizing air molecules until they vibrate? Italics!

And all those italics on the page can get confusing as we’re trying to figure out what each one is signifying. It also creates a lot of odd situations if someone’s, say, thinking about a cool book they just read. Or speaking emphatically in a foreign language.

Also, it can look weird to have a big block of italics on the page if a character decides to have an extended inner monologue. Again, said as someone who put a lot of blocks of italics on the page for the Ex-Heroes books. It does weird things with spacing and leading, too.

All that said (italics for emphasis, not foreign language), if we’re not using italics to show thoughts we probably shouldn’t just use some other formatting. No bolds or underscores, small caps, other fonts, or anything like that. Word processors can let us do a lot of weird stuff on the page, but that doesn’t mean I need to do a lot of weird stuff on the page.

Also, please don’t use quotes (double or single) for thoughts. Remember when I said there are definitely wrong ways to do things? Well 99.98% of the time, using quotes for thoughts is the wrong way. I’ve seen a few folks try that and… wow. You wouldn’t believe how confusing it can get. Or how fast it gets there. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do but… well, I wouldn’t do it.

So what does this leave us with…?

Well, one option is what we could call direct thoughts. Treating thoughts just like dialogue, just without the quotation marks so it’s clear they’re not out loud. Essentially, just what we’d do with italics, but with no italics. Something like this…

I should grab something to eat before I head over to Phoebe’s, thought Wakko. Or maybe not. I’m not really that hungry.

If I want to do thoughts this way, a few things to maybe keep in mind. One is that I want to be clear where these thoughts are coming from, because that attribution is also going to help clarify that these are thoughts. I know in the past I’ve talked about trying to pare down dialogue tags, but in this situation… personally, I might lean into them a little harder. Just a bit. Especially if I’m using a POV where the reader could have access to a few characters thoughts.

Two would be that I’d probably set the thoughts apart from any significant amount of action. Sometimes with dialogue we’ll start with someone talking, describe an action or three they’re taking, and then finish off that paragraph with more dialogue. But since the thoughts don’t have any punctuation to set them off, it can be a bit confusing to go back to them. Me, I’d just give them their own paragraph to make sure readers don’t get knocked out of the story if they suddenly have to figure out where the action stops and the thoughts begin.

Another option is to use implied or maybe indirect thoughts. Yeah, I made that up, too. What I mean is, the narration can give us the sense of what Wakko’s thinking rather than word-for-word transcript of what’s going on inside Wakko’s head. This is what I tend to do most of the time in my books. For example…

Wakko considered grabbing something to eat before he headed over to Phoebe’s, but decided he wasn’t really that hungry.

See? Same thoughts as that example a little further up, we’re just a step back from them, so to speak. Or so to think. I feel like this method works with action a little better, too, so I don’t need to break it off in its own paragraph. And that makes for a smoother reading experience.

It’s also possible to use both of these methods. Seriously. They mesh fairly well. The same way we might use dialogue most of the time but then sometimes write something like– Yakko filled them in on the new clues he’d found. We can do that with thoughts too.

Oh, and one final idea about how to represent thoughts in a book. Maybe just… don’t. It’s a totally valid narrative decision to close off every character’s head and make the audience wonder what she’s thinking or what he’s wondering about or if they’re both thinking about the Roman Empire again or something silly like that. It might end up being a bit more challenging, but I think it can make for some really cool storytelling.

I’ll also add one more thing. Thoughts can be fun to write. That ongoing inner monologue, remembering this, figuring out that. It’s easy to fill a lot of pages with thoughts. But I want to be sure all these thoughts are advancing my plot or my story somehow. That’s it’s not just me, the author, twiddling my thumbs for three or four or ten pages. People will lose patience with that real quick, especially once they realize these little soliloquies (mental or spoken) don’t actually go anywhere.

And that’s all I’ve got for you on thoughts. Ultimately, like anything else– dialogue, action, descriptions—the important thing is I don’t want my method of telling the story to be disruptive for the audience. My readers shouldn’t be stumbling trying to figure out if a sentence was narration or inner monologue or spoken-out-loud dialogue. As long as they understand what they just read and it keeps the story going at the pace I want… it’ll be great.

I think it will, anyway.

Wow. I really babble on a lot here, didn’t I? This is what I meant when I said thinking can take up a lot of space on the page.

Well, next time, as I mentioned waaaaay back when, I was going to try to redeem myself for all these late posts (see, I said you wouldn’t remember). And I guess one way to do that is to give you another post on Friday. It’s my birthday this week, and—as I have in the past—I may use the day to offer some thoughts and advice about another aspect of this whole writing thing.

So until then… go write.

Hey, look! Lori made a request a few weeks back and we’re fulfilling that request. Because that’s how we roll here!

So, the question is details. How much is too much? How do you know if it’s not enough?

This won’t be great to hear but… this is pretty much impossible to answer. Mostly because writing is art and all art is subjective and a lot of the stuff we call “description” is a huge chunk of the art portion of this equation. Hypothesis? Theorem?

Anyway, my book isn’t going to be anything like your book. Your style isn’t going to be anything like my style. And we each probably have different ideas about how we want our respective stories to land. And that’s before we even touch on basic structure ideas, that different chapters and scenes are going to have different pacing and purposes and will need different levels of description and detail. Within the earlier restrictions I mentioned about our individual styles and all that.

Really filling you with confidence right now, aren’t I?

I thought about this a bit, and I think the best thing I can do is give you my own personal rules for how I tend to approach these things in my own writing. The sort of rules-of-thumb I use to decide if I spend a paragraph describing someone or something, or a full page, or maybe just half a sentence. And like any kind of writing advice, this is just what works for me, so it might not work for you. It definitely won’t work for that guy. But hopefully it’ll get you thinking and considering things in your own work…

So here’s my three guidelines for adding (or not adding) details/descriptions in my writing.

1) Are these details necessary

There’s an idea I’ve brought up once or thrice here before, Damon Knight’s information vs noise. Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we already know are noise. We like getting information and we pay attention to it. Noise is annoying, and we tend to ignore it whenever we can.

In my mind, describing objects, places, or processes that we all know is kind of a waste of my word count and the reader’s patience. Especially if these things aren’t somehow important to my plot or story. We all know what a smartphone looks like. And a grocery store. And how to pump gas. I don’t want to spend my precious words on things like this. I want to use them to describe the strange pendant that woman slipped into my pocket when she bumped into me. Or that alien in the middle of the road I might have just hit with my car.

What’s that in the back? Well, yeah, there are a lot of makes and models of phones out there. Very true. But honestly… how many of them look all that different, especially once they’re in a case? I mean, think of the BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. His smartphone was a huge part of his character and how he interacted with others, and the show itself changed how everyone does texting in television and movies.

Off the top of your head,…can you say if Sherlock’s phone was an Android or iPhone? You probably can’t because the truth is it’s completely irrelevant. It would’ve been a waste of time to make any sort of distinction.

In fact, as I’m scribbling this, I’d like to expand on the information/ noise idea a bit. I think the first few times we encounter obvious noise in a story, we tend to think there’s a reason for it. That the author has a purpose for describing something we’d otherwise consider not worth mentioning. I mean, they wouldn’t give us half a page of description of the waitress and give her a name if she wasn’t kind of important to the story, right? This has to be information. And that’s why this sort of thing can cause a lot of frustration, because at some point the readers realize the waitress is irrelevant and it doesn’t matter what kind of phone she uses and they’ve just been processing a lot of noise that isn’t necessary to the story.

Now, before anyone gets too grumpy, I want to move on to my next wishy-washy rule…

2) Do these details serve a purpose

A purpose? Wait, isn’t that what I was just saying? Am I having a stroke?

When I say a detail serves a purpose, I mean it might not be a necessary, integral part of my plot or story, but I still have a reason for including it. Maybe it’s helping me set the tone or the mood or it’s hinting at something about a character or location or an object. Whatever it is, if you asked I could explain the function of this bit of description.

For example, what color and model of car Yakko drives is probably irrelevant to my plot. It’s important that he has a car, but nothing hinges on him having, for example, an economy car vs a sports car. The reader could picture either and nothing would change in my story. But if I call it his fire-engine red midlife crisis on wheels? That’s giving you piles of extra information, isn’t it? It’s not necessary, but it serves a purpose.

A few key things here. First is word choice. Since I’m putting in this description for a reason, I should really make sure the words I choose push that purpose. Like with Yakko’s car. It could’ve just been a red sports car, but describing it the way I did told you it’s a red sports car and about Yakko, and about how I (or maybe the narrator?) want you to view him in this story.

Second is not to go overboard. It’s easy to describe more and more and more and come up with a rationalization for all of it. Like, if I want to show how wealthy someone is, I could give lush descriptions of every item in their office and it’d all fall nicely under the umbrella of “showing how wealthy they are.” But I could also probably do this by focusing on just one or two things– maybe that painting or the weird glass sculpture of.. whatever that is. Friggin’ modern art. Costs a bundle and I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a flower or a naked woman or maybe it’s just a shape? I don’t know. Some people have money to burn, right?

I’ve got one more details guideline for you. I really think this is the most important thing about including details. If you want to ignore the last two things, fine, but please consider this one…

3) Are these details affecting the pacing

Almost universally, things are going to get faster and tenser as my plot and story progress. That’s just basic narrative structure. It picks up its pace as it moves along. And I want my readers to feel that quickening of events, that rise of tension. I want it to carry them along like a wave carries a surfer.

Description almost always brings things to a halt. It can’t be helped. In the real world we can actually see/ hear/ feel things and absorb all those details almost instantly, but on the page we have to write them out. A single glance can take four or five paragraphs to cover everything we saw.

This means it’s very easy for details to mess up my pacing. If things are moving at even a mild pace, one or two paragraphs of description can slow things down and knock us out of the story for a moment. If we’re near the end and things have really picked up speed, hitting even a few lines of excess description can be jarring. So I need to be careful about where and when I deploy them.

It’s my own personal style, but I’ve mentioned before that I like action (as in fists and guns and swords and car chases action) to feel like it takes about as long to read as it would take to happen. As close as possible, anyway. It doesn’t sell a blinding-fast martial arts fight to write out each strike, each block, each counter. Same with running in sheer terror from the monster in the woods, which has two primary horns on each side of its head, three smaller curled horns clustered around them, and a sort of ridged brow over each eye, which are a fiery red. These are times when–IMHO–pausing to add a lot of detail can really kill the pacing or tension. It knocks us out of the fast-paced flow of the moment and suddenly we’re standing around counting eyebrow ridges instead of running for our goddamned lives.

Also, overall, I feel it’s better to describe things earlier than later. The pacing should be slower in the beginning of a story, so it makes a brief pause here or there fit in better. Plus, it makes sense to describe things when we first see them (or when we eventually stop running away from them)

And again, there could always be an exception to this. There might be an all-new element in the third act that has to be described in detail. But really, if you think about it, structure kind of demands these things be rare. If I’m introducing a lot of necessary stuff in my third act… something may have gone wrong somewhere.

So that’s it. Those are the three ways I tend to screen my descriptions and details to figure out if they’re good, excessive, or just completely unnecessary. Hope they help a little.

And if you’ve got a question or a topic request, please let me know.

Next time here, I’d like to talk a little bit about one of our planet’s great philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It’s going to be so much fun.

Until then, go write.