How to Go From Good to Great Using Your Powers of Observation
God is definitely in the details
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It’s stating the obvious to say that details are everything, but I’ll go ahead and state it: Details really are everything. People read to get the big picture, but what they really savor is the detail that pops off the page, that lodges itself in their minds as they’re reading. It’s the difference between a story that’s just fine and a story that’s terrific.
Details often are part of descriptions. I think a lot about descriptions and how to make them work, and more than that, how to make them memorable. A good example is describing a character in a piece. I used to feel obliged to provide a lot of description of people I was writing about — a sort of catalog of specifics from head to toe.
Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t giving testimony in a legal proceeding, and that descriptions didn’t need to be exhaustively comprehensive. I began to feel that anything specific about a person that was generally true, or statistically likely, didn’t need to be mentioned. For example: Many, many people have brown hair. I don’t have the statistics to back me up, but I have a…
