I've been thinking a lot about details lately.  Because, as we all know, all good writing is full of details–sensory details, the telling detail, details.  And, it has occurred to me that a worthy approach to details is to devote one complete draft to them.

Details are something that can easily added in during a second-to-last run through of your manuscript (the last draft being devoted to grammar and spelling and tinkering with every word).  In my experience, both in my own writing and the work of others, the first few drafts are sketchy, sometimes even outline-ish.  More and more gets added on as we go, and thus the world of the story gets developed and shown to the reader.

The writing becomes fully mounted on the page.

(It is painfully obvious when work is not fully mounted on the page.  I just read a book in which this was the case–I couldn't see the characters because there was no description of them, couldn't envision the room in which the scene was set because no details were given.  And, I didn't believe the character's emotional arc because it went from zero to 90 in one second–no details in between.)

In the story I've been working on, I inadvertently did a detail draft.  As mentioned in my blog post earlier this week, I got inspired to go back through my story and juice it up a bit while reading Jess Walter.  I admired his style, the way he layered on details and decided I better go back and look at what I had done.  Because, as I mentioned, my story felt a bit flat to me.  So I went back through looking for places in which I could make the story better and more alive by adding details.

Here's a couple of examples:

Before

What had previously made
her happy was her life the way it had been, when she and Michael and Molly
lived together in northeast Portland.

After

What had previously made
her happy was her life the way it had been, when she and Michael and Molly
lived in a northeast Portland bungalow with a door painted red for good luck,
and Nell woke up every morning with a deep sense of the rightness of
things.

Before

Dana fitted the key into the gallery door.

After

 A
huge cottonwood towered over the entrance to the courtyard off which the
gallery was located.   Pots of
yellow, white, and sky blue flowers flanked the door, which Dana fitted her key
into.

Too many details?

I don't know about you, but I think those details jazz things up considerably.  In truth, I didn't add that many details overall, but the ones I did add made a difference.  And that brings up another point, as a reader (thanks, Don) mentioned in the comment section of the last post–you can do too many details as well.  The idea is to find the details that will bring the scene to life in the reader's mind.  One trick here is to think sensory details–sights (which we all mostly do well), sounds, touch and, especially smell–writers forget to add in smells all the time.

I learned a way to approach the adding of details from a lecture by Sena Jeter Naslund when I was in Louisville in May.  She advocates making your sentences work harder, and one way to do this is randomly point to a sentence in your manuscript and study it.  Can you make it work harder?  Does it need more details?  This is a fine approach for a detail draft, I think.

How do you approach getting the proper amount of detail into your work?  Please leave a comment.