Richness in the Details
Today has been a day for movies with that lush feel of glamorous old-school Hollywood — Indiscrete, A Touch of Mink… Men in tails, women in full-skirted velvet and satin evening gowns and luxurious fur coats, perfectly furnished apartments with hand-carved mantles and plush upholstery, dramatic vistas made even more vivid with that touch of Technicolor.
These settings are slightly familiar to me, but enough unfamiliar that the details stand out. And that’s how it should be in stories, too, I think. Especially speculative fiction stories where you have to do world building. When a fictional world is rife with rich and textured details, you can fall right into that fictional dream, feel like you’re really there.
Nothing new, I suppose, but I’ve been thinking about it today, anyway.
Strangely, when I’m creating a world, one of the things that makes me feel like I know the world intimately is when I know how the characters are going to dress for a given situation. It’s always been that way for me. My first “books” — eight or ten page stories scribbled on notebook paper in junior high — had little to no description of the scene, but every character’s outfit was immortalized in print from shoes to hat or hair bow.
This obsession with clothing is one that I’ve had to force myself to temper in my current writing. The outfits are always there in the first draft (though, not quite so detailed as they were when I was in junior high). I have to make myself cut them out during that pesky revision stage (or at least some of them, enough not to have clothing ad nauseam).
It’s a careful balance really — leave enough details in to make the world lush and real, but don’t overwhelm the reader with unnecessary facts that are irrelevant to the plot. Just another ball for the writer to juggle in the air, another one of the tricks from our bags.
And with that thought, I’ll leave off yammering for tonight. G’night all!
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Erin:
It’s all about the detail, isn’t it?
I am visually oriented, too, but for me, the fiction becomes real when I have a fix on what the characters look like.
It doesn’t have to be photo perfect, in fact I prefer it if it isn’t, but it has to be telling.
In His Prime, a story I have coming up at Every Day Fiction, offers a character who is “all moustache and mirrored sunglasses”.
I think it works, not because every reader will see the same image, but because everyone knows someone who looks that way. That’s who they see and that makes it real.
K.C.
Hoohoo!
The other day Randi and I were discussing how there are few female scifi writers vs. fantasy; she wondered why that is, and I said, “They all want to write about clothes. No. Of course not. That could be construed as sexist, and I don’t mean it at all. I am totally kidding.” But I thought of you.
K.C. — In my head, I like to picture actors or other people as my story’s “cast.” I don’t describe them down to that detail in the story, of course, but sometimes it helps me get the feel of them.
I like that, “all moustache and mirrored sunglasses.” Very nice!
Jens — I thought of you when I was typing that bit about the clothes. More specifically, of all those crits where you say, “Arg! More clothes?!”
It’s funny, though… I’m not that interested in fashion in real life (aside from enjoying Project Runway), but something about the clothes really helps me get a feel for my characters and their world. Strange!
Back before I joined WI, my stories were usually all descriptions, dialogue and internal monologue and no plot. Now I focus more on plot (not that I’ve mastered it, lol), I usually have to go back and add details so I don’t just have a bunch of faceless stick figures doing stuff in a blank void.
I know what you mean, Steph. I had that void comment come back to me from an editor recently (http://www.erinmkinch.com/blog/2008/07/15/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/).