What happens when you overthink your storyworld so much that your novel is filled with thousands of irrelevant details and your story gets lost?
Sam posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
Hi Randy,My name’s Sam. My problem right now is that i have seriously overthaught my story. I dream it, daydream it and effectively live in it from time to time. this means that when it comes down to writing, my story is full of incredibly boring details that no-one really wants to read.
Typically, my chapters end up being 1/5 interesting, 1/5 plot important, and 3/5 of solid, useless details that are important for the imagination, but not to the story.
My question is, How do you counteract the cumalative mind-numbing effects of incredible detail, without compramising the integritory of the story, and ‘putting danger around every corner’ to compensate. how do you make sure that youve said everything important and nessisary, without going overboard?
Ive made the mistake of dreaming up a whole new alien world, with new sights, smells, even the fruit. i want to explain the new world and all its glory, but i dont want to make it boring.
Randy sez: First of all, you’re doing things right by thinking about your Storyworld in Xtreme depth. Most of the novelists I know do that. We may be sick, sick people, living in our own little universes, but that’s what novelists do.
Now, your question, Sam, is how to keep that from being boring.
The solution is one I heard in the very first critique group that I ever attended. One of the critiquers quoted a very famous line from a very famous author (but nobody seems to agree on exactly who that famous author was): “A story is just like real life with all the boring parts taken out.”
And my immediate response when I got whacked over the head with this comment was: “Are you trying to tell me something? Which parts of my story are boring?”
I didn’t get an answer to my question, and I left the meeting that night feeling rather miffed. If somebody is going to tell me there’s something wrong with my story, they at least ought to tell me what it is.
I now know the answer, and by a grand coincidence, it’s found in my most recent blog, where Jonathan asked whether a story really needs conflict.
My answer was yes, a story really needs conflict, because that’s part of the definition of a story.
The reason is simple: Conflict is interesting. Conflict means that some character wants something that he or she can’t have. When you read about a character like that, you either want the character to get it, or you don’t want them to do so. Either way, you want to read on to find out what happens.
So the “boring parts of the story” are those that don’t have anything to do with the conflict. The “interesting parts” are those that contribute most directly to the conflict.
Sam, you’ve cooked up an incredibly detailed Storyworld. That’s Job 1 for the novelist. Job 2 is to only show those parts of the Storyworld that relate to the conflict.
That’s your yardstick with everything you show in your Storyworld. The more a detail is part of the conflict, the more time you can spend showing it.
Does this mean you can’t ever show any other details at all? No, of course not. Those details add texture to the story. But if you’ve got 1000 details you could use for that pesky story texture, and if five of those details are critical to the conflict, then show at least those five — and maybe five others that aren’t critical but which you just want to show.
That might be a good rule of thumb for a novelist: For every detail you add in that’s unrelated to the conflict, show at least one detail that is.
What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Is that a reasonable way to write a story? Leave a comment and say your say!
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.
Blog of the Day: Meredith Efken had a couple of good blog posts yesterday and today on her Fiction Fixit Shop blog in response to questions posted here on my site. Meredith is my freelance editor and is helping me catch up on the incredible backlog of questions I’ve got. Today, she talks about dual protagonists in a novel. Yesterday, she answered the question of whether the Scene/Sequel structure needs to apply to the antagonist in a novel.
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This is a timely entry for me, because I’m finalizing my novel (for the 243rd time) to send to a publisher. My problem is the opposite from Sam’s in that I don’t add enough detail. To add one superfluous detail to a necessary one is doable, methinks.
I think that’s an awesome rule of thumb. I really struggle with which details are important to the Storyworld and which ones can be thrown by the wayside. So this helped me tremendously. Thank you, Sam, for posing the question. And thanks, Randy, for giving such a concise answer. Even a scatter-brained writer like myself should have no trouble remembering to use conflict as a yardstick.
I love to read about details of a novel’s storyworld IF it doesn’t pull my attention away from what’s going on in the story. I would treat it just like you would if the story were set in our world: just like if your protagonist were ordering a burger there would be no need to describe everything else on the restaurant’s menu, if you were to mention your protagonist feeding their pet wakzoo a juicy piece of moribban fruit (or whatever) that would suffice without going off on a tangent about all the details of the local flora and fauna.
I purposely “lost” the entire first chapter in one story – beautiful, historic background important to the conflict, but a generation before, not close enough to warrant saving.
The necessary details will emerge in the current story in tidbits, and the rest will remain in the storyworld in my brain.
Thank you, Randy for inspiring, challenging, and motivating this difficult, but life-saving surgery.
The storyworld for Nelson DeMille’s novel “Up Country” is mostly Vietnam of the late 1990s. The hero is a returning Vietnam vet sent there on a secret government mission. Most of the half of the novel is the setup as the hero settles into Vietnam and hangs around with the love interest. There’s interesting, but seemingly fairly minor, conflict, but a lot of his interaction with the country reads like a travelogue. And his thoughts flip between the war and the present, and how to make sense of it all.
Kept me turning the pages, though. So it’s hard to say even the more travelogue-like portions were boring.
It’s worth a study.
Randy, I like your rule of thumb. You have a way of cutting to the point and clarifying it.
One thing I appreciate when reading a novel is being led to picture the scenes, people, places etc. Sometimes the story becomes so visual for me that later I can’t remember if I read a book or watched a movie. This doesn’t happen as easily for me if too much detail is dictated by the writer. I think this is because I become too busy trying to fit it all into my own image that reading becomes work and I get frustrated or lose interest. I guess my imagination doesn’t need much encouragement.
When I have an urge to spew everything I know about my storyworld, I try to remember (or at least hope) that readers enjoy participating in the story as they read; filling in the insignificant gaps, such as which direction what a character ordered for lunch, the colour of someone’s shirt, or the make and model of a vehical parked on the street. I hope the reader will notice when I do include details that are relevant to the plot.
Very good point, Charlotte! I am completely agree. Only a few seeds are needed to give me an idea of what the location or characters should look like, and then I mentally cast them in my head and love filling in the gaps. But when an author describes in TOO much detail, I find myself trying to either force the extra stuff to fit into my mental image or just skipping over those words so it doesn’t ruin the picture I’ve already created in my mind.
Case in point, just finished reading Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” and my mind immediately casted Gerard Butler as the lead (who else thinks he’d be PERFECT?
there is the age difference, but people looked older at young ages back then and there are the sequels to consider after all) – so every time the author paused to describe Jamie Fraser’s glorious coppery red locks, I had to mental shut my ears at those points. 