[FFML] [SPAM][info/essay] Writing: Details (re: Rants, Raves, etc)

I was reading the thread "Raves, Rants, Reviews and Requests"
and was inspired to dust off an old essay on writing I started
a loooong time ago. My aim is to illustrate various points of writing by
showing the evolution of the first three chapters of an original
SF/Adventure story "Beastworld" that I submitted to the DragonCon
Writers Workshop. (the original essay used my fanfic "Bedlam Fire" for examples but I've long since lost the intermediate writing stages I was going to use for illustration.)
Some of the things I'd like to talk about are:

1)Characterization (and my pet-peeve in fanfiction, that OOC is really just
bad characterization)
2)Voice
3)Narrative/Description and involving all the senses, not simply visual description
4)SHOW don't TELL (and when it's better to TELL, rather than SHOW)
5)Dynamic Tension
6)Plot
7)Editing, especially Self-editing and how to give and take criticism.

I'd like to point out that all of this is simply the opinion of an as-of-yet non-published writer. :) If you want to hear what real published writes have to say on the subject, go to:
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/

Since the thread seems to be concentrating on "details" and whether
or not it matters if the author uses real details or simply makes things
up, I'll start with that.

Details. When they matter and why they matter. For a change of pace I'll use a couple of Musicals for examples to start with.

"West Side Story": Look at the dance numbers by the "Sharks" and the "Jets".

The choreography is totally different and designed to complement the different characters involved. Simple seeming details in footwork, arm movement, rhythm are sufficient to define and emphasize the characterization of each group/individual.

"Fiddler on the Roof": Look at the "Bottle Dance". In order to create 'authentic' dance scenes for the movie the choreographer researched Hasidic Jewish communities in NY and spent time in old villages in Poland and Russia researching folk traditions. (source: American Movie Classics). The 'details' in this case, while not historically or thnically 'correct', nevertheless provide a critical backdrop for the story as a whole.

"Dragon 's Egg" by Robert L. Forward is chock full of detail. IMO it's
a physics lecture thinly overlaid with a story. Tom Clancy = Techno-thriller, emphasis on the Tech. On the other hand, Edgar Rice Burroughs did quite nicely as a writer while playing fast and loose with reality. He had plenty of striking detail, he just made it all up. :)

So, why does detail matter. More specifically, why does it matter if the detail in your story corresponds with reality? For one thing, it's easier to use reality rather than making it up. The more an author makes up out of whole cloth, the more likely it is that he will write himself into a corner. If a story is set in Tokyo, for example, it's much easier to use an actual map of Tokyo to describe a character moving from point A to point B, than it is to make it up and the author is far less likely to have a character take a right at the corner to get to his boarding house in chapter one, and turn left in chapter eight. It's certainly possible to do this sort of thing entirely from imagination (and it obligatory
in a lot of SF/F) but why re-invent the wheel? Make up what details you must for the story, but if you can use existing 'reality' it saves a lot of time and trouble.

Let me illustrate this point with an excerpt from "Beastworld".
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Beastworld

Chapter 1

"Blue take it and burning mountains break it." Mercy Thornbreaker cursed softly, staring down over the valley rim. About a mile across it was shaped like a shallow bowl that had been smashed in a fit of anger. The valley floor was covered with tangled brush and tumbled stone overlaid with a confusing eddy of mist rising off hundreds of shallow streams. The cold trail she'd been following had suddenly frozen solid.

"This would be a lot easier if he'd just stay put so I could kill him." Mercy muttered, idly scratching her big tobiano mule around the base of her black spiral horn. "Quit fussing, Buttercup," she admonished as the mule's clawed forefeet dug nervously into the hard soil. "We've gone into worse spots than this."

Buttercup snorted in disagreement.

Mercy sighed. She and Buttercup had been together since an orphan human-child had been put on the back of a fractious pack mule named Bone Biter. Instantly captivated by the tiny girl, Bone Biter had adopted Mercy by simply stomping, clawing or spearing any Ursa stupid enough to argue the point. That had been thirteen years ago, and the big mule still thought Mercy belonged to her.

Mercy pulled out her mono-glass and scanned the valley. Broad shallow streams flowed aimlessly from north to east out of dense patches of cerulean razorwhip, crossed fissured granite, and vanished again into broad fields of golden wheatgrass. Dotted across the landscape were hundreds of small water falls ten to twenty feet high.

Patches of mist curled off the wet ground and eddied about weird broken stone formations like ghostly cats. The ground was mostly lichen slick rock riddled with fissures, cracks and sinkholes or covered with debris deposited by flash floods. Bare rock gradually merged with a dense cover of wheatgrass, scrub pine Black Willow, thistle, yellow mudwart and scarlet deathcap. A scrub-covered hill, about two hundred feet tall, stood almost dead center of the faint path that led down into the valley.

"I don't see anything." Mercy offered casually. "Looks like it should be safe enough."

Buttercup simply rolled her eyes, refusing to budge.

Mercy flipped her Honor Braid forward from behind her left ear and began running the thick twist of copper-coloured hair through her fingers. Playing with the waist-length braid that hung from her otherwise shaven head was a habit even Mother hadn't been able to break, though she'd broken a score of bamboo switches across her adopted daughter's shoulders in the attempt.

"Why would they set up an ambush?." she thought out loud. "They don't even know we're on their trail." *Not their trail. **His** trail. The ghost-eyed Wolf.* Six cerulean chevrons on her cheek ached at the thought. One for each Beast who murdered her mama and papa and left her for dead under their rotting corpses.

Buttercup whickered in concern, picking up on Mercy's sudden tension. Mercy patted Buttercup absently as she pulled her braid through her fingers. Two glass beads with a bit of charred bone in the center tinkled merrily against each other. All that remained of the Shengo brothers. She'd found the Otters sweating out a drunken binge in a bath-house outside Brokenbarge just before her ninth birthday. Chasing out the whores and other customers, Mercy barred the door and set fire to the building.

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Notice that I blended 'real' details with things from my imagination.
The 'valley' exists only in this story. However the geology, flaura and fauna are all based on reality. The basic geology is from Yellowstone park and similar places around the world. " wheatgrass, scrub pine Black Willow, thistle, yellow mudwart and scarlet deathcap." are all real plants. "Razorwhip" is my invention. I was much less likely to make a major mistake if I used an existing terrestrial geology/ecology as the basis for my 'valley' than if I tried to make up everything from scratch. It also helps to ground the reader in what's going on if you give them something familiar in the story as a frame of reference.

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* "Blue take it and burning mountains break it." Mercy Thornbreaker cursed softly . . .*
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I needed profanity appropriate to the culture. In this case, Mercy's adoptive parents are "Chadar", a pragmatic and basically agnostic philosophy. Therefore, IMO, a curse involving 'deity' would be 'out of character'.

Two things that dominate life on the planet Krishna are the "Burning Mountains" a range of volcanoes that bisects the Human/Beast controlled portion of the planet from the Blue.

The Blue is the original 'floura/fauna' (so called because the dominate colour of the native vegetation is cerulean. ) which is at best poisonous to Terrestrial organisms, at worst actively hostile. (Razorwhip, Angel Clouds, Death Bells, Moonkiller Moths, etc). Therefore a potent curse to anyone would involve either or both of these dangerous and dominate features. A further advantage is that using this made up detail quickly sets up the story as being 'alien' and introduces the "Blue" and the "Burning Mountains", details very important to the story.

Details of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste flesh out the story,
they make it more three dimensional. There is a bit more constraint when using these kinds of details. Real things, things that the reader is familiar with must be used to describe alien things. For example, "Razorwhip" is an alien plant. I could have easily called it "Blorthmuggen" but that wouldn't have helped the reader picture it very well. OTOH, with a name like "Razorwhip" at the very least you don't get the impression you'd send a bouquet of the stuff to your sweetheart on
Valentines day. Later on in the chapter you find a more detailed description:

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* But where was he? Using razorwhip as cover?* The phosphorescent blue stalks like barbed two-headed snakes moved with the morning breeze. Stiff, angular motions, like a battalion of soldiers marching to storm a city lush new growth snaked along the ground toward the wheatgrass. There was always Blue in the borderlands, but it shouldn't be this thick so far from the Burning Mountains. If Blue was pushing back the Green, that could be a real problem.
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Using a descriptive name can be a sort of shorthand to help the reader visualize something or get a feel for a scene when it might not be appropriate to the pace of the story to give a more detailed description. It's possible that I could have put a more detailed description of"Razorwhip" when I first mentioned it. And if I'd called it "Blorthmuggen" I almost certainly would have had to do more at that point in the story. As it was, simply choosing a descriptive
name allowed me to leave more of the details to later in the story where I felt it was a better fit.

Why details?
Details flesh out the story, they add verisimilitude and depth to the
characters,situations and narrative. Make up the details or stick with reality? It's possible to invent every detail, from ecology to theology, language, customs, architecture and what's for lunch down at the deli.

J.R.R. Tolkien did it. Of course, Tolkien was a genius, a leading scholar of Old and Middle English and twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford. With that kind of background you can get away with a lot and not make a mistake. IMO it's easier and safer to keep the purely made-up details the minimum necessary to write your story.

You want details for a solid narrative, to make your characters live and breath. You want details so that your reader can smell the smoke from a distant fire, hear the rain on the roof or taste the miso soup for breakfast.

When details?
That's up to the author and the needs of the story. A rule of thumb is to
consider the pace or timing of the story. Details should never interrupt the flow of the story. Detail should be integrated smoothly into the narrative/dialogue and not made into an infodump; a large indigestible lump of data. Details should flow naturally from what is going on in the story and only when and where the reader needs them. They should not be added simply to show off how smart the author is or how much research he/she has done on the subject.

Well, these are my thoughts on the subject. I hope it has been of some interest. I'll ramble on about the other points I mentioned as time permits.

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