Careful of too many details

When you’re at the buffet at Sizzler, a little bit of everything might be a great idea. Have some salad, some taco fixings, three kinds of dessert. However, what works great at Sizzler probably isn’t the best plan for your memoir.

This may sound counterintuitive, but when you’re writing your memoir, don’t give us a smorgasbord of details. You might be thinking, but what about creating a rich visual image for the reader? 

The question itself is already flawed. Your job is not to create a visual image for the reader. As an author, your job is to create an emotional experience. And too many details actually dilute that emotional experience. 

A lot of information simply won’t stick in your reader’s brain. It also makes a reader work too hard. When an author describes every detail in a room, I have to concentrate to picture everything and it slows my reading (and my enjoyment) down a lot.

Instead, you want to convey an idea about a place and then only add in the details that are related to that idea. In short, you want to describe a setting from the narrator’s point of view. 

Let me give you an example. The following details could be used to describe a hospital room:

Smells of antiseptic. Adjustable bed. IV stand on the side. Heart monitor in the corner. White walls. Bathroom on the edge of the room. 

Those details make it feel like the author scanned the space from left to right and described everything they saw. The end result is that I might picture that room, but I don’t really feel it. The problem is that this kind of description is generic, which never works to affect your reader emotionally.

How would you rewrite this without giving your reader a little bit of everything? How could you describe a hospital room using the narrator’s point of view instead of a generic description? 

This is how Laraine Herring describes her hospital room in the memoir, A Constellation of Ghosts.

“Singing bowl chakra music plays on my iPad while the big cats frolic in silent, non-HD quality. The computer station to my right flashes its constant screensaver about the dangers of MRSA. The man in the room next to mine moans. He will moan for three days before he's gone. I won't know whether he died or was moved to another location.” 

The author hasn't given a generic hospital room. She's given her version of the hospital room, which include the specific details that are important to her. One of my favorite details is the MRSA screensaver. That is so much more telling than the generic “smells of antiseptic” or “white walls.”

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Here’s another example, this one from Truth & Beauty, in which the author Ann Patchett describes an auction. 

“In a long barn there were cafeteria-style tables set out with boxes. One contained seven dolls with plastic heads and matted hair, four chipped cups, a coil of rope, pulleys and two spades. The next had a toaster and a thick stack of record albums, half a dozen extension cords, several packs of playing cards, countless forks. Every box was an inexplicable collection of items that had to be purchased as a unit. There was no picking out what you wanted.”

The writer doesn't spend any time describing the barn or the tables. Instead, she focuses on the one detail that makes the place unique, and what stands out for her. In doing so, she creates a sense of how odd the place is. 

So, here is a quick recap of how to describe a place from the narrator’s point of view:

1. Don’t give us every detail when describing a place. 
2. Write the unique details that stand out to you. 
3. Include your thoughts as well as visual details.

I hope this helps. Happy writing!