Writing On Your Palm

The Snoozefest

23 February 2004

How much description is too much? I found out recently the perils of in-depth research.

(Yes, I'm doing an actual writing column. No PDA stuff this week.)

I talked a while back about serial fiction, a little experiment a friend of mine and I are doing to bring the storytelling model so successful in print and television to prose. I turned in the first draft of my first issue to my writer's group for critique, and got a heck of a rude awakening. The story was called a "snoozefest" and several members of the group couldn't even make it to the end. I've been called a lot of things, but I draw the line at "boring." I'd be even more ticked off if they weren't right.

My part of the story starts off as a police procedural, not unlike the popular TV show "CSI:". In fact, my main character is a forensic investigator, though h won't stay within the confines of the criminal justice system for long. Rather than base my knowledge of forensics on watching CSI: on TV, I did quite a bit of research into actual crime scene investigation before writing my issue. I forgot that research and backstory need to stay in the back.

For example, here's a passage from the first draft:

Finally, the big one. He knelt down near the victim with the knife in his chest, careful not to kneel in the blood, and took another look at the knife. There were two ways to go here, and pros and cons to each. If he removed the knife now, he could screw up evidence in the body, make the wound larger and messier than it was. If he didn't, handling of the body between now and the autopsy could contaminate any evidence on the knife itself. He decided to leave it in, but went back to his kit to get his fingerprinting gear.

He carefully applied the dust to the handle and hilt of the knife, then peeled a fingerprint sheet from its adhesive backing. A strip of vinyl roughly the size of a playing card, the sheet would pick up the dust in the pattern of any fingerprints left on the surface of the knife. He carefully peeled the sheet back up and reapplied it to the white backing sheet. He continued this process until every accessible part of the knife was processed. Looking at the sheets, he was disappointed to see no full fingerprints, only a few partials. He'd compare them to the victim's back at the lab to see if he had a lead on the killer or not.

While not exactly the worst prose ever written, it doesn't sing. It reads more like a how-to book on forensics than part of a thriller. Also notice that there's no sense of character. We as readers have no idea what our character thinks about this killing or how it affects him, assuming it has any impact on him at all.

Here I was guilty of the same affliction that so drives me bonkers reading authors like Tom Clancy. just because I did a lot of research, there's no reason to inflict it on my readers. Some description is necessary, of course, and a police procedural would lose a lot of flavor without it. But just because I know how to lift fingerprints doesn't mean I need to describe the process down to the last detail.

Now here's the same passage in the second draft:

Finally, the big one. He knelt down near the victim with the knife in his chest, careful not to kneel in the blood, and took another look at the knife. There were two ways to go here, and pros and cons to each. If he removed the knife now, he could screw up evidence in the body, make the wound larger and messier than it was. If he didn't, handling of the body between now and the autopsy could contaminate any evidence on the knife itself. He decided to leave it in, but went back to his kit to get his fingerprinting gear. He pulled a few partials from the handle of the knife and nearly a full one from the hilt, but he'd have to run them through AFIS to find out if they were from the victim or a lead on the killer. Personally, he doubted they were from the killer; the kills were all quick and professional, and professionals rarely left prints.

Shorter, cleaner and more readable, yes? It also gives more insight into the character's assumptions, let's us know what he thinks about the case rather than painting him as an evidence-gathering automaton.

When is it okay to leave that kind of detail in? When it's truly important to the story that the reader know. For example:

"More blunt trauma, but this time more severe than a kick in the jewels," Carlson said. He brought a magnifying lens around on a mechanical arm, the kind used in dentist's offices. Positioning it over the face, he scrutinized the dead man's skin. "Check this out." He motioned Max to look through the lens.

Max looked at the close up of the dead man's face, not seeing much but a dead face. Then Carlson said, "See that square hash pattern?"

There it was. A regular checkerboard in the bruised flesh, each square maybe five millimeters wide.

"We'll have to run a comparison to be sure, but that looks like the same pattern used in the ripstop nylon fabric in military fatigues. Were any of the participants at the crime scene wearing fatigues?"

"No, none of them. Mostly denim."

Carlson walked over to the other side of the table and picked up a scalpel. "Denim's a different pattern, mostly diagonal. You're missing a suspect."

The pattern left in the victim's face from the fabric used in the pants of his killer is a vital clue, and it's worth spending some time to explore it. That's the kind of detail that makes mysteries so much fun to read, but it's only worth it if it means something. Your reader's attention span will only tolerate so much rambling before requiring you to shut up and get to the point.

Not that I buy into the short attention span lament used by writers dating back to Edgar Allen Poe. As Cory Doctorow recently pointed out, the attention spans of audiences in the 21st century aren't necessarily shorter than they were in times past, they're just different.

While few readers today will have the patience to slog through War and Peace, they have little trouble keeping up with the latest Harry Potter installment. People that can't read two different books at the same time have little difficulty following the plot threads of a dozen TV shows. it took J. Michael Straczynski over five years to complete the telling of his "novel for television," but millions of us tuned in eagerly for every installment of Babylon 5.

Twenty-first century audiences have attention spans tuned for following many different input streams in parallel, from email to TV to serials of boy wizards. They have no problem sticking with an author for small chunks of story spread out over a long time. But don't bore them, or they won't come back for the next installment.

Jeff Kirvin
Jeff@writingonyourpalm.net
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