Ask a Book Coach: To Detail or Not to Detail
Every writer knows their story world intimately—who their characters are, what they look like, where they live, and the events that have shaped their past. We use story bibles, outlines, or plotting software to help ourselves to make note of it all as we’re drafting. But the real challenge can be determining when and how to tell your readers what they need to know. What does your main character look like—and how do you introduce this in the book? What about the events from their childhood that shape the decisions they make in the present day? Book coach Rona Gofstein explains how to share the details that matter most to your story without bogging down your reader—and how you they can be used to say even more about your characters than what you put on the page.
Did you ever finish a book and realize that you couldn’t “see” the characters or where they were? Or maybe you’ve had the opposite experience—the pace seemed too slow, or you skipped through pages because you were tired of all the descriptions and wanted to get to the action. As a coach, I’ve seen writers struggling to decide how and when to give this important information to readers. Learning to balance details while moving the story forward is an important skill and at the heart of this month’s question: How much detail should I give the reader, and how can I give it to them without it feeling like an info dump?
It’s not easy knowing when, where, or how to insert details into your book. Fortunately, you have the perfect device to get started: your characters. By using your characters to show the reader the people and places around them, you reveal not only what the characters see but also who they are and what is important to them. Who the character is, and what they’ve been through before the start of the story, influences what they notice. What they love or what they hate is reflected in what they respond to.
If a bibliophile walks into someone’s home, they won’t care whether the couch and carpet match well. They are going to notice the bookshelves—or the lack of them. Someone who came from little notices abundance and may be envious or admiring. Someone who’s often left out notices how everyone acts, so they can fit in, adjusting what they wear and what they say.
Let’s look at this in context. In the opening of The Hunger Games, Reaping Day makes Katniss more aware of her District and what it does and doesn’t have, so it’s natural for her to tell us what she sees. And when she arrives at the Capitol, we are as overwhelmed as she is by the riches that surround her. Her initial dislike of Peeta and her meeting the other tributes gives us a way to see them as well.
So what details can you show us that bring us closer to your characters?
If your main character is mad at someone she’s supposed to hate but notices his charming smile or the way his T-shirt is tight over his muscles, you’ve shown us the beginnings of unwanted or unexpected attraction, in addition to giving us a description of your male main character. If he arrives at her home and he focuses on her collection of hand-painted Dungeons & Dragons figures, he might realize he has something more in common with her than he thought, and we learn about what she likes to do in her free time.
If characters have lived in a city all their lives, a night sky filled with stars is a new occurrence and worthy of stopping and standing still. But they might also jump at every sound in the silence. Both these descriptions and your characters’ reactions to them tell readers key information to move the story forward.
Another thing to consider when deciding “to detail or not to detail” is your book’s length combined with readers’ expectations. If you’re writing a fifteen-thousand-word insta-love, then you need to keep the details to a minimum. You have more important things to tell the reader in the space given, and they want to get to the heat—fast. However, if you’re writing Epic Fantasy? This is an opportunity to give lots of details, and your reader will be there for them all: the setting, the clothing, the magic, and the different beings who live in this world. In this genre, you can make your descriptions big and vivid.
When you’ve finished your book and are revising, I recommend watching for two things. First, where can you use descriptive detail to give a scene or character more depth? Second, where can it be removed? If you’ve told the reader the color of a character’s eyes and hair, there’s no need to repeat it every time they appear. Add detail, however, when the point-of-view character notices something new—hazel eyes that become greener when someone is angry, long wavy blond hair fanned out over a pillow, or papers strewn across a normally neat office. These tell us about changes, and change moves a story forward and keeps a reader involved.
A detail is a moment in your book where you’ve told the reader, “Look at this.” You’ve stopped the action to show them something. Make it worthwhile. Within the parameters of your genre and length, use your characters to show readers the details that reveal the most, and you are more likely to have them absorbing what you want them to see—and continuing to turn pages.
Rona Gofstein
