It’s been more than a year since I used a Sherlock Holmes quote as the basis for a blog post about writing. And while it’s a different topic this time, I’m using the same quote, from The Reigate Squires: “It is of the highest importance to the art of detection to be able to determine, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital.”
The post last year was about figuring out the essential core of your story. This time out I’m thinking of historical fantasy, which is what I mostly write, and the details of historical settings. How much detail do readers need and which details?
In my first draft of Let No Man Put Asunder, for instance, I have Mandy making multiple movie references as she’s a film buff: to Notorious, North by Northwest, With Six You Get Eggroll, Viva Las Vegas, The Way We Were, Last Year at Marienbad, and that’s just the first two chapters. The unanimous conclusion was to dial it back and make sure everyone of them had some context, and to remember not everyone is going to know all these films. It was good advice. I eliminated the incidentail films in that list leaving me with North by Northwest —
— and Notorious, and highlighted that Mandy’s a huge fan of both Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant. The essential detail is that movies (and, unfortunately, smoking) are her escape from the stress of her daily life, but just saying that without some specifics wouldn’t work for me.
Paul is a mystery fan, movies and books both. In the first draft he mentions picking up books by Richard Prather, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr at the used book store that morning, again without me explaining who they are (though I doubt anyone didn’t know who Christie is). In the second draft (still under way) I get more specific (e.g., “three locked-room mysteries by John Dickson Carr.”). I thought that detail was incidental — isn’t “mystery novels” enough? — but I was wrong.
Obviously it’s easy to go too far with this. In one of my Atoms for Peace stories, I have my protagonist Steve in a bar where the patrons are watching Zane Grey Theater on the bar TV. I could have explained what that was but why take the time? It’s an incidental detail, it doesn’t affect the plot or characters, so even if readers haven’t heard of Western author Zane Grey, I don’t think it’ll bug them too much.
In Southern Discomfort there’s constant reference to the politics of the day: The FBI’s recently uncovered history of harassing the civil rights movement, Watergate, the Kent State shooting, terrorism, anti-war activism. It’s incidental in that most of it doesn’t affect the plot but it does ground the story in its specific time, May of 1973. Most of it gets the minimum explanation possible because it’s all current events to my characters. Have I judged the level of detail right or left it too confusing?
Guess we’ll find out when I finally put it into some readers’ hands.
Cover by Zacharia Nada, all rights to images remain with current holders.
