Process Post: Summary vs. Sensory.

If you’ve taken any of Dean Wesley Smith’s online classes, you probably know about “details” and “fake details.” Fake details are the details that rely on the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. Readers are wonky and imagine all the wrong things, don’t you know? Except when you already have control over a reader, and then you can use fake details to help pick up the pace.

The explanation of what details to use and what not to use sort of made sense, except I kept getting stuck on the idea that all details are fake details in some sense, because we’re reading. We can’t spray the scent of vanilla in the reader’s face; we have to say, “She smelled like vanilla” and hope the reader can imagine that more or less accurately.

The split between types of details made sense (eventually!) to me, but I felt like there had to be a better way to explain it. 

What I came to was: some details appeal to the more intellectual parts of your brain and some to the more sense-based parts of your brain, and there has to be a balance if you want the reader to be able to process the story without stumbling.

But balance isn’t good enough. Logical details are, somewhat irrationally, impossible to remember. You have to lean as hard on the sense details as you can in order to make up for the brain’s tendency to wipe out facts after a few seconds as a reader’s short-term memory fades.

You know what’s easy to remember? Sense details, location details, feelings. We can remember the logical details when they’re associated with something we already know, or with an emotion, sense detail, or location. 

Our brains are generally just built that way. Dean’s “fake details” were just details that didn’t light up the stronger, older parts of our brains. Reader try to map the details somewhere in their brains, and those details get stuck to different things than were in the author’s head, causing confusion.

Imagine a candle.

I bet it wasn’t the kind of candle I was imagning, because you’re probably not sitting next to a light-blue skull candle that cost $3 from Target and that’s been burning for over an hour and now its brains are dripping out its ear area. (It doesn’t smell like much, though. I buy candles for the smell.) My daughter picked it out! It makes me smile to look at the candle, because it’s funny that the “brains” are hot wax dripping out an ear, and because my daughter excitedly said something like, “Oh…can I…have this?” at Target, and I could say yes. I keep having to lean back at the kitchen table in order to look past my daughter’s laptop screen and see the candle, on the right – and every time I do, she looks at me to see what I want. “I just want to see the candle.” “Okay.”

I dare say that you’ll remember that candle now, too. (Although I doubt you’ll remember the table.)

So when I edit, I look for enough sensory, emotional, and location details to make sure the reader remembers the rest of the plot, characters, and conflicts in the story. Otherwise it feels like the “real” parts of the story don’t have meaning, and readers are just gonna forget them immediately. 

More later. I hope this helps.

 

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