Living the Fictional Dream

Last night, at my writing group’s monthly write-in, I worked on revising a story that the group critiqued at the meeting in June. One of the main characters gives birth during this story. Now, as anyone who knows me or who has spent much time on this blog knows, I have given birth myself (and I will be doing so again later this year).

My familiarity with this subject matter led me to an interesting conundrum. How much detail on a subject like child birth is too much?

Juggling the amount of detail to include in a story is a balancing act sometimes. As a writer, you have to know more about your world than anyone else. This is especially true if you’re creating a fictional world from scratch (like a sprawling fantasy realm or a high tech sci-fi world), but I’ve found it true in literary and mainstream writing, as well.

You have to know your characters inside and out. You have to know much more of them and the world they live in that needs to show up on the page. In fact, if writers routinely put all the information they have on world building checklists and character descriptoin forms into their stories, readers would run away screaming at the minutia of it all.

So, all that to say, I know that I need to limit the baby birthing details in this story. However, I found while writing it that this particular subject was really hard to reign in. And then, when my writing group read it, I found out that details I thought were important and fairly universal, were actually too technical and apt to be misunderstood.

I had no idea no one else had heard of APGAR tests. Amniotic fluid was another stumbling block. Hard to talk about a woman’s water breaking without mentioning amniotic fluid!

And then there is the consideration of how much detail is too much on the ick-factor scale. Let’s face it — child birth is pretty gross. You’ve got fluid and cords and a placenta to deal with. Not to mention that, despite what you see on television, that baby does not pop out all clean and pretty — it’s actually kind of gray until it gets to breathing and that cottage cheese looking stuff that covers it… even I’m squicked out by that! I wouldn’t want to write a story where the readers stopped reading because the details were too disgusting. (And this particular story is actually in a genre which is traditionally read more by men than women, so the tolerance level for child birth ick might be even lower.)

On the other hand, though, I got many comments from the crit saying that they liked having the details because it helped ground them in the story. So, for all the bad things about including too much, you also want to make sure you include enough that your readers can fully imagine that fictional dream and be fully committed to it.

Last night at the write-in, I took another pass through the story with a critical eye for detail. I’m not sure I’m done tweaking it yet. There is actually another plot element that I’m toying with adding, which would make a new draft a definite. But, hopefully, detail-wise at least, I’ve sorted out some of the problems.

If you made it through this whole entry, feel free to let me know what you think on the subject. How much information about birthing babies is too much for you?

Happy writing (and reading), everyone!