Detail and how much to include

The most common problem with amateur storytelling is not too little detail but too much of the wrong kind.

The two kinds

Which behave completely differently.

Detail that does work: a specific that makes the scene visible, establishes character, or carries meaning.

One well-chosen concrete image is worth several sentences of description.

Detail that does not: chronology, logistics, names of people who do not appear again, and the sequence of how you came to be where you were.

Which is the material people include because it happened, and which is the reason most stories are too long.

The logistics problem

The most common failure.

"So I was going to meet Sam, but he was running late, and I had parked on the other side, so I walked round, and then—"

None of which is the story.

The fix: start at the moment something changed, and supply only the context that moment requires.

Which is generally one sentence rather than a paragraph.

Choosing the detail

What makes one worth keeping.

It is specific: a named thing rather than a category.

It is sensory: something seen, heard or felt.

It is unexpected, which is what makes it memorable.

It implies more than it states.

And it could not be replaced by a generic equivalent without loss.

The test: if you removed it, would anything change?

How many

Fewer than instinct suggests.

One per scene is often enough.

Two or three across a whole story.

Beyond that they compete, and none of them lands.

Which is why professional writers cut detail rather than adding it, and why first drafts are almost always over-furnished.

Names and numbers

Which are a specific case.

Names of people who do not recur should be removed, since listeners try to track them and fail.

"A colleague" is better than a name the listener will not need.

Precise numbers are memorable and should be used sparingly for exactly that reason.

And a round number is generally better than a precise one unless the precision is the point.

Dialogue

The most efficient form of detail.

A line of what someone actually said conveys character faster than any description.

Which means keeping the exact words where you remember them, rather than summarising.

"She said she was unhappy about it" is inert; "she said, 'well, that is one way to do it'" is not.

Keep it short — one or two lines — since long reported dialogue slows a spoken story badly.

Where detail belongs

Placement matters as much as quantity.

At the start, to establish the scene quickly.

At the moment of highest tension, where slowing down increases the effect.

Not in the middle of the action, where it interrupts.

And not after the ending, which is where people habitually add the epilogue nobody wanted.

Adjusting for the listener

The context variable.

A story to someone who knows the people involved needs less setup and can carry more names.

A story to strangers needs everything unfamiliar removed.

A story in a professional setting carries less personal detail.

And a story that competes with a noisy room must be shorter and simpler than the same story told at a table.

The revision

How stories improve.

After telling it, note where attention wandered — that is the section to cut.

Note what you skipped and nobody missed, which means it was never needed.

Note the detail that produced a reaction, and keep it.

And each retelling should be shorter, until it is not, which is where it has found its length.

The general principle

Which extends beyond storytelling.

Concreteness makes anything more comprehensible and more memorable, and this holds for explanations, arguments and reports as much as for anecdotes.

The discipline is not adding detail but choosing it, and then removing everything that was there only because it was true.

Detail in writing versus speech

A difference worth noting.

Written prose supports more detail than spoken storytelling, because the reader controls the pace and can reread.

Which means a story that works on the page frequently needs cutting by a third to work aloud.

And a spoken story transcribed usually reads as too thin, which is why speeches rarely make good essays without revision.

The detail you did not choose

A final note.

The detail that arrives unbidden while telling a story — the thing you had forgotten until the moment — is frequently the best one in it.

Which is an argument for not over-scripting, and for writing down what emerged afterwards so it survives into the next telling.