Focusing on the Small Details

Story details enhance your stories ten-fold

Photo by Houcine Ncib on Unsplash

In novel writing, we tend to focus on the major elements and structure of a novel, such as developing a proper story arc that features interesting characters pursuing and achieving a goal. But much of writing a novel involves paying attention to the small details. The details are what readers remember. They are what make your novel unique, distinct from those of your peers. Details give your story flavor, voice, originality, and make it memorable.

And yet, writers fail to focus on the details and spend most of their time on the larger building blocks of plot, uninspiring characters, and typical, generic settings. Those are all necessary, but so are the details that take a plain story into a superior realm.

Details in description

As we describe characters, settings, or even actions, we have a perfect opportunity to add details.

Let’s take, for example, describing a character’s eyes. Suzy had brown eyes. Is that enough? Maybe, but 70–80% of the people on Earth have brown eye. What does this really tell us about Suzy?

We can describe the shade or deepness of brown, and that would be better. This article in WikiHow states there are six types of brown color types