80/ "The heaving combatants stirred the bones at their feet". "Stirred" implies intention, but not much of it. I stir tea. I stir pasta. Bones, though? The writing implies attention - that the hero is taking care that the bones are well distributed in his chai.
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92/ Two points about requiring description to be "motivated" (and by motivated, I mean roughly what, say, a DP or director means about lighting in a movie - is this light coming from the sun / in through a window / from a mechanic's drop light?) :
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93/ first: when this rule is applied, it PRUNES some description. If you can't find a motivation to justify explaining the color of the hero's shield, then you don't do so, and that's good - it was, apparently , extraneous, and removing it is the right call
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94/ second, if you CAN find a motivation, then you solve two problems at once, and you achieve economy think about the scene where Luke is fighting the monster in the cave on the ice planet Hoth when do we get a close up of the light saber?
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95/ Not two scenes earlier in the hanger. Not when the cave scene starts. We don't hear or see that the light saber is silvery, or has rings carved into it merely as background information. We get a close up of the saber when it's PLOT RELEVANT
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96/ Luke tries to free his feet, tries to reach the saber with his arms, and decides to use the Force. At this point the camera focuses on the saber. And not even to show off its colors, but to - focus OUR attention on it - to show the FORCE twitch it and move it
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97/ We see, in passing, that the light saber is cylindrical, knurled, has a D ring and two rivets at the bottom - but that's not the POINT of the scene. The POINT of the scene is - danger - salvation (out of reach) - hope - technical mastery of skill only in SERVICE to that
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98/ do we, in passing, get the mostly useless detail that the light saber is silver
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100/ (damnit
@JASutherlandBks !) There are so many stories where I remember tons of details - the smell, the cracks in the walls, the color of the helmets ... and then I go back, and I re-read ... and NONE of these were in the story! The reader will fill in colors.Show this thread -
101/ Elmore Leonard has an adage "don't write the parts that people skip". Similarly: "don't write the parts that people are entirely willing to fill in on their own".
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102/ In my novels I thought a lot about a lot of the technical details. I took out lots of description. I don't think I ever mentioned, for example, the color of the space suits. That doesn't mean that I didn't have ideas. But you, the reader, filled that in.
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105/ I mentioned it in passing in one place, where the militia raised by Red Stripe painted the red stripes black ... but that wasn't because I cared, but because I wanted an "equipping" scene showing a civilian economy preparing for / transitioning to war footing
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106/ color mattered because MOOD and PLOT matter, not because COLOR matters on its own the somber painting over of a cheery warm color with a dark color symbolic of death is fitting for an unwanted war
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107/ The scene was set on a soccer field. Same thing - England commandeers small pleasure boats to rescue soldiers - hotels are turned into hospitals. The colors were MOTIVATED by the demands of plot and emotional truth.
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108/ Aside from that use of color in space suits, it doesn't matter at all to the plot if they're white or orange, and you the reader can fill in a mental image that works for you, so I tried to leave it up to you.
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110/ There are tons of details in Aristillus. I'm not a minimalist. I cut out about 2/3 of the details I wanted to have, and what I left in was probably 10x what I should have had. ...but I'll say this. What's there is MOSTLY motivated by plot or character.
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111/ At three points the "camera" lingers on the catwalks, cables, and conduits overhead in the tunnels. One of these is plot relevant: an infiltration team is planting a bomb that will collapse a ceiling.
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112/ One of these is character relevant and backstory: Mike Martin is riding his motorcycle somewhere, early on in the book and is paying attention to infrastructure. It explains that he's a sperg who likes machines, and it smuggles in backstory about how he founded the city.
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113/ And the third time is at the crux of book 2, where Mike has been taken captive, is being brought back to Earth, and will be tried and sentenced. His gaze lingers on the details, drinking it all in, his eyes getting moist realizingthis is his last view ever of what he loves
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114/ ...and even then, as he looks at the conduits and lighting panels, no words are wasted on the colors or filigree. If you pictured the lighting panels while reading it, great. If not, great. Either way, you got as much as you needed for the story to work.
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115/ This is pretty decent. As I wrote I tried to set each scene and PoV hard in the first paragraph. I aimed to always deliver the PoV character's name and then had that character observe at least two sensory details about the scene.https://twitter.com/Laserpig_Utopia/status/1253048365752909824 …
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116/ The sky above the spaceport was as black as a freshly bored lunar tunnel before the lights were installed. Earth hung overhead, the once-bright cities...glowing dimly w low-energy bulbs and rolling brown-outs. Except California. California was dark. Mike Martin squinted
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117/ chapter 2: The taupe-carpeted corridor that ran down the center of the West Wing was quiet. Senator Linda Haig looked at her watch. Almost half an hour late. Hardly surprising; that woman was never -
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118/ chapter 3 Allan looked up. The next handhold was just a short reach up the wall. He stretched for it - and the suit alarm went off. Damn it. He silenced the warble tone, cleared the flashing "overheating"
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119/ Each of these has a few adjectives, a few sensory images. Chapter 1 is a bit of an outlier, with more detail than the others, because I have to drop the reader in media res, explaining a moon colony, an Earth in economic decline, etc. all in 1 paragraph.
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120/ Chapter 2 announces "taupe carpeted...West Wing... quiet". Tell me you didn't fill in the off-white walls, the wainscotting, the tasteful end tables with lamps, the plaster work on the ceiling. I said enough ; you pictured it.
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