Hatrack River Writers Workshop: How much is too much?

This is topic How much is too much? in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Marva (Member # 3171) on :

I'm sneaking my way up to novels from short stories. It takes practice to write longer works. My tendency is to skip on "color" details that don't (to me) seem to matter to the thrust of the story. However, a dear friend (not a writer, but an avid reader) sent me this in regard to my first draft novella:

Just grow the plot and your characters, especially your protagonist. Describe the landscape (yes, I get bleak and dull an grey), where do they get their food? What are their clothes like, do they pop out from a machine, are they made. Do her parents touch? Do they read? How do they reconcile spending their lives as drones in a hive? She escapes, but why didn't they. Did they read to her when she was small? Does she like perfume, grapes, pictures, what color looks good on her? Why or why not? How do they travel on her home planet? Did she ever get to "drive" something? Are smells a part of memory pattern? Describe her martial art form. On page 67, would they really have a room key? Would she really give the key to Smith? Probably not. How else could he find where she was staying and access the room. What kind of communicators do they have. I mean we all have cell phones, and if I gave a room key to someone, I would call and let the others staying with me that a stranger was coming up. There is soooooo much good stuff that you want to keep it. Hey what about dangerous plants, bogs, bugs (think yellow jackets).

I think you get the gist. A lot of this stuff I did have in a later draft. But, do I really need to talk about potential plants unless, of course, said plant happens to be muching on the heroine?

Is there any way to tell when you're adding too much and when you haven't got enough (unless you have a friend willing to point out these things to you)? Any rules of thumb? I see people here talking about 100K and up works. Do these folk have the knack of coloring and I'm still working with two crayons?

[This message has been edited by Marva (edited September 07, 2006).]

Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

It's hard to make the transition. But I am sure you don't get it to novel length (in a good way) by padding with details that don't interest you or the reader.

I originally did my first (about to be marketed) by having multiple POV characters and going between them; also by having complications. OSC said that wasn't enough. I needed to ground the reader in the characters. I ended up striking two POV characters and lengthening and going into greater depth with the others. The "depth" meant how they felt, and sometimes their past. Of course, I don't know if this is the best way.

And I still don't tell you what what kind of trees are growing nearby or what color Cheryl's hair is or that the sunset had vermilion in it.

Posted by Christine (Member # 1646) on :

The amount of description is NOT the biggest difference between novels and short stories and in fact, I'd say it's not a very big dierence at all. You can spend a little more time adding local color and setting the scene, but you really have to stick to plot relevant details, the same as in a short story.

It is the plot itself that needs to be more complex in a novel. You have time to explore subplotsin a way that you really can't in a short story. For example, in the rought draft of my second novel (which I just FINISHED, BTW!!!), the main character is looking for a missing person. That's the main plot. As a subplot, she is still in love with someone from long ago who has come back into her life and has to choose between him and a new love interest. As another subplot, she struggles with personal choices she has made because of the world she lives in (that I won't go into because you don't understand the world). And finally, there is a strong millieu element to this as the world is different from this one, interesting, and drives the plot. (The person she's looking for is the man who screwed up the world....far future scifi) Oh, and there is this tiny little subplot with her pregnant neighbor.

All these elements come together at or near the climax. The other thing I can do in a novel that I couldn't do in a short story is take more time to resolve each conflict. The main conflict, for examle, takes the main character on a mini-tour of the midwest during which time she gets captured and has to escape, gets in the middle of a firefight, and loses her hand. (Ouch!)

It's not that each scene takes longer, it's that there are more scenes. Your plot heats up thusly:

Conflict (always start with conflict)
Action (the hero/antagoinst should almost always take this action)
Result (the hero succeeds or fails...could be mini-success or mini-setback)
Complication (Unless we're done, there should be something to complicae matters. Then you transition to the next scene).

Anyway, in a short story you can only fit a couple of these cycles in (depending upon how long they are) but in a novel you can fit more, and some can relate to the main plot and some to subplots.

My point is that if you are padding your novel with description then you are putting in too much. Pad it with substance. It's much more fun. Personally, I don't much like short stories.

Posted by kings_falcon (Member # 3261) on :

Too much detail is when you lose the plot or the reader's attention. I'm not sure how you gauge it objectively though.

Well, that's not completely true. It becomes too much when the detail is not necessary to the story or establishing the POV. Do I really need to know there are yellow jackets? Maybe.

Also, readers vary. You can see that over at F&F. When there is a description heavy section posted, some will love the imagry and some will say: "Ack! Too much info dump. Tell me what's happening."

Posted by Silver3 (Member # 2174) on :

Christine is right. The setting of a novel is more complicated than that of a short story, but it's also to provide more support for incidents

Think more characters, deeper characterization of more MCs, more subplots, a more twisted plot.

Posted by Elan (Member # 2442) on :

In my opinion, what your critic was trying to tell you was to build more sensory detail into your story. It's not that you need to detail that whole long laundry list of stuff, but that you need to bring in some richness to your story. Knowing how much detail is enough and how much is too much is, frankly, one of the hallmarks of a good writer. I am slowly learning that less is more, but I'm also learning that a detail, from the MC's POV, that triggers an emotional or sensory response, beats the pants off any long winded adverb and adjective laden description.

Posted by Marva (Member # 3171) on :

I'm working on it! It's the subplots that leave me scratching my head. I'm such a cut-to-the-chase kind of person, it's hard for me to see the purpose of them sometimes.

Thanks, you guys. This type of discussion helps me a lot.

I think my friend tends to want to stroll the hillsides, smelling the flowers a little too much. If there's a pitched battle going on in the valley, nobody should care if the fighters are trampling daisies or dandelions. But, I guess some people do want to know.

Posted by Christine (Member # 1646) on :

I don't care if you throw in some flowers, but here's the way to do it:

"The combatants trampled the new spring dandelions and turned them red with blood."

Now the image is playing into the battle. On the other hand:

"The flowers had bloomed early that year thanks to the false spring. The hopeful yellow dandelions, fooled by the temporary warmth, suffered an even more tragic demise when the armies of combatants marched over them, crushing them beneath their heals."

The first example is about the battle, and is using the flowers to add to the telling of the bloody battle. The second example is about some flowers, and who could care less about those flowers when there's a battle going on?

Posted by sholar (Member # 3280) on :

I think Christine's example is perfect. I tend to be pretty scarce in details as well and so it is something I am working at. My husband recently challenged me to write just a description of some person/place/thing. It was an interesting experience as it showed just how many details I usually ignored. Not that all the details would or should make it into a story, but being aware of them a little more actively helped me decide which ones were worth while.
As far as the plant, something about it interested your reader- she wants more. I don't know enough about your story, but maybe there is a subplot hiding over there.

Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

My father tells me that in college he had to write a 300-word description of his thumb -- with absolutely no redundancy or extraneous words in it. He says that although it was one of the toughest exercises he ever did, it helped him see things he hadn't looked for before, and then he could choose from among all of those things to write a much more interesting five-word description.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I heard a while back that a major SF publisher tends to edit out lengthy and / or lyric descriptions of natural phenomena. (I forget which one.) I'm not sure that I could stand that kind of editing---but I'm willing to take a chance.

Posted by Marva (Member # 3171) on :

Ah Christine! Great example of how to work in those darned dandelions. Very useful for those of us with the black crayon and white paper. Now, where did I put the green and yellow? Oh, yeah, need the red, too.

Posted by pixydust (Member # 2311) on :

Good luck, Marva! You're getting great advice. I'll just add one more shout out to character development. In a novel you have an amazing opportunity to show your characters in a lot more color and depth than you would in a short story. And your world as well. It's like sinking rather than plummeting.

Posted by Zero (Member # 3619) on :

Disclaimer: I didn't read any of the comments.

Marva: I have never written a short story. I'm not sure I could. My first completed piece of fiction was a novel. I throw out any unimportant details obsessively, because to me I think they block the flow. I develop my characters and my plots, the rest isn't half so important. I find that as long as the important ideas are down, like, whether the setting is a prison cell or a cargo ship is more important than whether the cell is "gray and dreary, and haunting, with cement floors and deep casted shadows with wrought-iron bars, seven of them, and five doors, each a foot taller than the next, each being wood, cedar was the middle one, one was oak, and one was a micture of cedar and oak, one was better crafted than the other, one was slightly cracked and had more knots..." my point is most of these details, unless they have an influence on the atmosphere or the story should be left out. [My opinion.] Because they do slow things down and most of them will be glazed over with boredom, forgotten, or else unnecesarily contradict the imagination of the reader.

Even with this philosophy my first novel's original draft was 130k+ words which is more than enough. The space will fill up easily, just decide to you what is important.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

I don't know how, but I wound up with a post intended for one thread in another. Probably my error in the first place. I'm editing to remove it.

[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited September 09, 2006).]

Posted by englshmjr18 (Member # 3906) on :

your reviewer may have been implying that YOU should know the answers to her questions, not neccesarily that a reader should. i read somewhere that description should be like the tip of an iceberg: there's much more under the surface than above.