Writing - Details

 When you are trying to engage your readers, there are many different strategies that you can apply. Personally, I enjoy description, which helps me picture the scene in my head. The danger is that with too much description, you can end up slowing the narrative to a crawl and losing your audience. You have to be able to discern what is the right balance to allow your stories to flow and yet also engage with the reader. 

 

One of my favourite books when I was growing up was HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean. In non story, he spends a couple of pages describing the sea conditions in the North Atlantic, which is relevant to the fact that the ship HMS Ulysses is a warship and it’s the Second World War. The information is so vivid you could almost make yourself seasick just reading it. 

On the other hand, there are stories where the description of a physical scene is so turgid that he actually turned me off reading, and one of those for me was Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Dickens’s writing, but as with all authors, not everything that he wrote was the most exciting or fascinating in style. 

When writing your magnum opus, there is the feeling that you need to spend time using flowery language and detailed description, which may be necessary to have a chance at the Booker Prize, but to entertain, it is probably necessary to be circumspect in the quantity of detail you include throughout your work. 

God Bless