A Small Theory of Detail
I’m not going to say much here that’s new, but the framing might be. I want to talk a bit about detail in stories. Why do stories need detail? What purpose do they serve, and when is that detail unnecessary?
You can say stories are arguments, logical explanations of a series of events. You have a premise (a land of dragons and wizards ruled by a evil king, awaiting a chosen one), which poses some interesting question (how do they depose of the evil king?), and the stories exists to explain the answer to that question.
But you can get that by just reading the cliff notes. It wouldn’t be very riveting, but if you just wanted to know how the dramatic question is resolved, there you go.
I don’t think this is quite the end of it, though. It’s not hard to construct stories that hinge on small details — a carelessly worded reply whose specific phrasing sets another character off, one small misstep in a fight that grants an underdog victory. For want of a nail isn’t a rare or unheard of trope. If you summarized such a story, does your summary account for the nail? Or does it stop at the missing rider? The lost battle?
This defines our first type of detail: functional detail. These are details needed for a summary of events to make sense. But there’s a funny thing about functional detail: specifics are infectious. After all, if we’re going to say the fate of the battle really comes down to one rider, if the outcome of a war is down to one battle, why? How much difference is there between “somehow, the crucial battle was lost” and “somehow, the crucial battle depended on one person, and they were not able to arrive due a lost horseshoe.”
This defines our second type of detail: antecedental detail. This is any detail required for other details to make sense. Is this different from functional detail? If a summary needs detail A, and detail A needs detail B, then clearly the summary needs detail B, too. So every antecedental detail is functional, but if what would it mean for a detail to not be antecedental? The key thing is to note that they are, in more familiar writing terminology, setup. A setup is an antecedent to payoff. If the goal of a story is to answer a dramatic question, then the antecedental details are everything that’s need to answer the question, but not the answer itself.
The answer, then, is the our third type of detail: consequential detail. If the key to the chosen one unseating the evil king is to work through his heartbreak borne of unrequited love, then that is the answer to the dramatic question. If they can only learn of this tragic affair because the brother of the king’s beloved yet lives, then that’s antecedental. To oversimplify it by far, if we care about it, it’s consequential. Antecedental details exist to pose the question, and set up the pieces for its resolution.
Perhaps an analogy to games would make it clearer: in a game of chess, the checkmate is the sole consequential detail. The exchange of pieces, their intermediate positions, are antecedental. In a game based around accruing points, though, every point gained would be consequential.
What about nonfunctional details? If I write that a woman’s dress was the red of blood, and it never happens that someone mistakes it for blood, or any other consequence, it’s clearly nonfunctional. But there’s something mildly striking about a blood-red dress, it’s a splash of character, and the story might be worse for its absence, and certainly the absence of all such descriptions — the exact visual appearance of people and things are seldom relevant, but rare is the story that gives you nothing to imagine.
We can fittingly call these aesthetic details. I include the color of the dress because I just think it looks cool. But not every description is included for its own sake, is it? I might like the dress, but it’s doubtful every last character is going to be wearing something cool. I’m not going to be able to point to every description and say yes, that’s there for its inherent aesthetic value. But nor can I say all of them are definitely functional. What’s going on?
An analogy to visual arts makes it clear: if you sketch a figure and lovingly ink the contours of its face, color in the eyes and blush on the cheek, but do nothing more, it looks a bit odd. Unbalanced: a concentration of detail here, and unrefined sketchiness everywhere else. It looks unfinished, and the typical way to make it look finished is to bring the rest of the piece up to a comparable level of rendering, even if the centerpiece, the point of the painting, is the face.
If you write a story and furnish it with functional and cool details, it’s rare for this to render a complete whole. There will be passages where events proceed straightforwardly enough to be easy to summarize; there will be objects that exist before or without you thinking of some poetic and striking way to describe them. You could rewrite things so that these passages instead offer some unexpected twist or crucial insight; tear your hair out to give every one-off character a soul… and perhaps it’s good advice to avoid situations where you are just contriving detail after detail to merely mimic a fleshed out story — but one must admit, it’s a strenuous ideal. Filler details, practically speaking, are going to crop up. And semantic negative space isn’t a terrible thing.
This might not just be for padding, either; if you’re writing a mystery and only ever lavish description on the important things, suddenly your writing style might be leaking information about plot direction.
This is shaping up to be a fair model of the kinds of detail there are: we have the consequential details supported by antecedental details, and aesthetic balanced by filler. Of course, functional details can be aesthetic, and the lines can get blurry indeed when you start to interrogate what the ‘function’ of these functional details really is. We started out with the simple goal of explaining the bare mechanics of how events happen in a way that makes sense — but stories aren’t just logical explanations. It’s not hard to alter these definitions for details that support characterizations, or underscore themes. Our initial scheme rolls this all into ‘aesthetic’, but it doesn’t have to be. We can call these ‘character details’ and ‘thematic details’ and set them to the side.
Instead, let’s back up even farther and ask: what does it mean to make sense?
In a for want of a nail scenario, the war needs the battle to makes sense, the battle the rider, the rider the nail — but why stop there? There are further details: of just how the nail got lost, why the rider doesn’t have more nails, the speed of the horse, and so on. We don’t reduce stories all the way down to the trajectories of individual atoms, but why not?
Fundamentally, supposing a nail was lost is a much easier ask than supposing a war was lost. We can easily imagine how the former could come about, and it’s hardly an imposition on the fiction world. (The common name for this principle is, of course, suspension of disbelief.)
There’s a sense in which an author is playing fair when they get into the details of nails and horseshoes, compared to if they brush aside entire wars in single sentences. This, I think is also what’s behind the classic ‘show, don’t tell’.
It’s all about axiom schemes. It’s easier (and more importantly, shorter) to prove things the more you assume. Your set of axioms and induction rules essentially definition what sequences of sentences are valid.
Or, for an example more close at hand, in tabletop roleplaying games, it’s not uncommon for combat to take multiple turns, involving several rolls, while a negotiation (which probably takes longer in diegetic time!) can be over in a single roll, or none at all.
The key analogy here is that there are rules to explaining narratives, moves that are legal, and getting interesting places can require several of these moves. We can imagine axioms in which the fundamental theorem of calculus is taken for granted, or trivially demonstrable; and we can imagine a roleplaying game in which combat is over in one roll. This is pretty convenient for a many applications, but the common way of doing it calls for a thorough step by step working.
This, by the way, brings us to something that probably felt missing at the very beginning of the discussion: a definition of ‘detail’ even means. What really is the difference between a detailed account and a summary, besides a subjective continuum?
A detail is any story element you can introduce without elaboration. A summary is something you can’t. You can’t just say “the chosen one triumphantly slew the dragon of ancient evil” and call it the resolution of your fantasy book, even if that is what happens, because it’s unsatisfying. It breaks the implicit rules of explaining events, much in the way starting out a chess game by moving your queen directly onto your foe’s king isn’t allowed. The reason we write stories instead of summaries of stories isn’t just because it’s more entertaining — or rather, it’s more entertaining in part because he added detail allows for more satisfying and believable justifications, made with fewer assumptions and allowances.