Detail and Description
Someone the other day commented on the lack of description in some stories. Can't seem to find it again but could not agree more with what he said.
Even if the plot is a bit thin, detail can spice it up, for example
1) She lifted herskirt, showing her black thong/white Aertex panties/tiny red knickers
2) The boy had a slender penis/a stiff erection/no pubic hair/a plump scrotum
Even gelded genitals show some variation!
C van D
Too much detail can be a bad thing as well. I think the best stories are those that have a good, creative build up to the main event but I don't want to spend a whole bunch of time reading about the room, the clothes worn, etc. For me I would want to know more about mindset of the people involved, how did they get to this point in their lives, etc.
Too much detail for the sake of making a story longer to me is just as bad as someone writing a two paragraph story that pretty much says, "he got is balls cut off..."
It's a delicate balance, but I've seen a lot of great stuff in the fiction archive from people who can pull it off. One of the reasons I have not written up the story I have in my head at the moment is that I'm not sure if I'd fall victim to one of these things I'm talking about. I need to go back and review the three stories I've written and see what I've done. I've had some positive feedback in the past on those, but the story I have in mind at present is a departure from what I've written in the past. I like the premise, but am keeping it to myself since I don't want anyone else to write it. *grin*
--LT
Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.
That's how I see it, too. The difference between an entertaining story and a newspaper report is that a story gets inside the main character's head. I want to know his or her motivation, not just what happened. I just can't get into a story when I don't get the feeling that I know the character.Originally Posted by Losethem
Sandi
The shorter stories definately have more of an impact on the readers. When I get requests to restore stories from the old archive, it is invariably a short story that is requested.
Have a look at the top rated stories in the archive. All the top stories are short entries.
They all tend to be short tales with a good level of description. The longer stories with more involved motivations tend to get lower ratings, and less comments.
Personally, I love a good long tale. I like to get involved in the world, get to know the characters, where they are coming from and going to. There are some stories that shouldn't be cut down.
I look at my own writing, and the response I get. With my two short stories, I've got very positive feedback, and ratings. With my longer entry now being published, the reviews are more mixed. Yet even so, I might write another long story, because I love the process regardless of the feedback.
My guess is that a large percentage of the people reading the fiction archive want something quick and impact-full. They don't want to invest a lot of time in a story that takes its time introducing characters, situations, and builds a world.
Some of the best stuff I've read on the archive has been long detailed, novel length stories. I love it. I feel deeply invested in the tale. The characters become like friends to me, and I learn something important about human nature. I learn less with the short stories, simply because they have less time to hone an important message.
I knew these things when I started writing my long story. I even posted to that effect early on. I wondered if I was leaving the castration too late in my story. It doesn't happen until chapter 14. I thought people would lose interest before we got to what they were waiting for.
In the end I had to decide why I was writing the story in the first place. Was I writing it to please the average reader here on the archive? No. I was writing it to tell a larger story. To do that, I had to let the story evolve naturally. I didn't want to skip any of the important steps along the way. I couldn't just start the story with the castration, because it was about a lot more than that.
Personally, I love a lot of detail in my stories. I love to see where the characters came from, and where they are going. I want to feel like they exist outside of just the words on the page.
In a balance with that, I try to keep some details to myself. Sometimes using too much detail to describe a scene doesn't leave enough room for the reader to fill in with their own imagination. I might describe a character as blonde, with green eyes, and beautiful, but I don't go further than that. What is beautiful to me, might not be beautiful to you.
Sometimes I find points where I want the story to slow down. I want to focus the reader on a particular moment of importance. At those times, I will allow myself to express all the details in my mind.
The amount of detail in a story should be balanced with what the author wanted to accomplish. If the author wants to write a story with the sole purpose of giving the reader a good wank, then spending a lot of time world building will be rather pointless. Spending a lot of effort on writing a detailed character might be something of a waste. Instead they should focus their detail on the main event. Make it memorable and alive, you can gloss over the rest.
On the other hand, if the author wants to tell a longer more involved tale, with a larger message, then I expect a lot of detail. I want to know what the world is like. I want detailed descriptions of the people that inhabit it. I want to know all the motivations and conflicts in the character's lives.
The real problem is determining where you put your detailed descriptions. You have to know what you want to accomplish with your story, before the answer to that question becomes clear.
For me, the more detail, the happier I am.
"Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth."
-Jean Houston
New eunuch stories can be submitted to eafictionarchive (at) gmail (dot) com
I'm curious to know which are the high-quality full-length masterpieces that are being overlooked. If you would provide a list of your favorites, I expect it would go along way toward getting them more appreciation. It would also help to include a brief blurb about the nature of the pay-off in each story, since that is so important and it makes it easier to make an investment in reading a longer work if you know it will pay off in the end.
I think that a longer story would naturally have deeper characterizations, and fully characterized people are more likely to behave realistically than the sort of people you find in super-short stories, but I've seen so many stories where a person suddenly starts begging to have his balls removed for no apparent reason. For me that takes all the dramatic force out of a story and shatters suspension of disbelief, but it seems to be what many people want, so it would be nice to know in whether or not that will happen before investing in reading a long story.
The value of this cannot be overstated. Knowing the characters and imagining that they exist with suspension of disbelief is hugely important to the impact of a story. Almost any good story really needs to make us believe in the characters, because the only other way to make a good story is to have a scenario that is so fun and inventive that it stands on its own, such as in "Halloween and the Jack-O-Lantern Contest," but that is very difficult.
I think the fundamental principle of what detail to include and what detail to leave out is quite the opposite of what you suggest. In principle, you should write what the reader wants to read about. Stated another way, you should write what the reader wants to think about. If you believe that the reader will be trying to imagine what a person looks like, then that means you should be giving all the detail necessary to satisfy that curiosity. Don't exclude details so that the reader can fill in the blanks; exclude details because the reader will skip over the blanks. The only bad details are the details that the reader doesn't care about, the ones that cause the reader to skim.
Of course, I have no real way to know how to get inside the reader's mind and determine which details the reader will want and which should be skipped. All I can think of is that when you imagine a scene you should try to make note of what details you spend the most time thinking about and then focus on those details when you write.
Personally, I think world building enhances the impact of a story enormously! The real waste is in castrating a character that I don't care about. Even if the only goal of a story is that "good wank," building up to it properly is really the only way to get there.
That is not always the case. My story Greg and Peter is about 23,000 words divided into three parts. Part one appeared on the top rated list very soon after the list started. A few weeks ago, part two and three appeared on the top rated list.
On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 someone sent me this email message:
_________________________________________________
Greg and peter is a beautiful love story
_________________________________________________
On 04/23/2007, I compiled a list of the number of hits my stories got. These are the numbers for the three parts of Greg and Peter.
Greg and Peter part 1 13,408
Greg and Peter part 2 5,622
Greg and Peter part 3 5,781
The first part (which had the love story theme) got more than twice as many hits as the other parts and far more hits than most of my one part stories. I think that many users read part one multiple times because they liked the love story elements.
I do not think many people read Greg and Peter to get a quick thrill.
There are actually quite a number of longer stories, or at least stories that set up a big world, that appear on the Top Stories list. "Traveling Tradesgirl," "Daddy's Pussyboy," "Age of Consent," "Boarding School," "Byzantium," "How to Breathe," "The Emasculation of Bill," "Freedom is Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose," these are all great examples. Plus both of my stories, "My Life As A Girl" and "Me & My Best Friend" have parts on the Top Rated list. And both of these are setting up very long stories. (The first is currently 24 pages long, the second is a whopping 68 pages at last count, with part 5 written and about to come online very shortly.)
Really, I think the key is just finding the correct balance in action. Make sure that something interesting is always happening, and make it feel like everything is building toward a conclusion. The good thing about short stories is that they have laser-guided focus. It has to get to the point and do it fast. You know they're building toward something. When you're writing a long story, though, there are a lot of ways that you can screw it up. It can take too long to get to the point, and people stop reading because they're tired of character descriptions and details with no action happening. It can do something interesting in the beginning but then get bogged down in filler where it no longer feels like it's working toward a conclusion and is just going to keep dragging on. It can dwell too long on the same feelings and readers can get tired of it. Or, my most common worry when I'm writing my stories, maybe it's just not deep enough and maybe the characters aren't good enough to warrant a long story, and your reader just loses interest.
I think the key is really to write a long story with short-story sensibilities. Start off by writing down every little thing that pops into your head, just so that you have a lot of material to work with, and thus are more likely to find things that are actually working rather than just declaring "this story isn't working" and giving up. Then once the spew draft is over, go back and nitpick it to death. For every single part of the story, ask yourself, is this interesting enough on its own? Would this part by itself be an interesting enough story to read? Does it still feel like it's building toward an eventual conclusion, or is it just filler? Are we learning something new about the character? Are the events interesting? Does it have suspense? Does it have some good deep emotions in it? That's what I try to think about when writing each part of a long story. Sometimes a story will come out all at once, and be near-perfect right from the beginning. But there are a lot of times where I'll hit a roadblock and have to start completely over again because it just doesn't feel interesting enough. This is why I have been stuck on part 3 of "My Life As A Girl" for the last 3 months, and why I still haven't released the other story that I mentioned in my introduction, "Tales of Interest."
Probably the hardest thing about writing a long story is finding a good beginning. So many times, I will have so many things that I want to say in order to set up the world and set up the main character's backstory that I'll end up writing a complete bore-fest of an opening because it's nothing but 3 straight pages of exposition. I have tried to avoid this, but it's really hard to find that correct balance between having an opening where nothing happens versus an opening where you don't care enough about the characters by the time something happens. I still don't feel like I've found it. Both of the openings to my stories have decidedly lower ratings than the parts where things are actually happening.
Last edited by cheetaking243; 08-10-2012 at 06:53 AM.
I agree that for me, More detail, and more time in the world of a story has more meaning for me.
However, I do recognize by the sheer volume of stories, and the high ratings of some, that there is a clear trend on this site, for most readers to go for the quick-wank kind of stories.
The highest rated ones are the stories that give a good amount of description in a short amount of time, and get to the main even rather quickly. If you read enough, you'll see that, although those stories have a good amount of description, they don't bother with too much. Check out the Ayzintion City series by Nathan. Great description in what is important to the tale, but not so much as to slow the stories down. For example, he is not busy describing every brick and blade of grass along the road to the city. His descriptions get more detailed, the closer he gets to the main event.
Nathan is a master of controlling the detail for when it is important, and knowing when the reader will automatically fill in the details on their own. If the writer is sufficiently skilled in this, the reader doesn't even recognize the lack of detail in some places. They get the detail they want, when they want.
I'm a detail-aholic. I do not read the stories for a wank. I read them for the characters. More important to me than what the character looks like, is how they feel and react. I want to know what they are thinking and feeling all the way through. It does not really matter to me what they look like. But I certainly don't reject a story because it has too much detail.
I love a good long tale, that tells the story with engaging details. I try to give those longer tales high ratings if they deliver. I'd like to encourage more novel length writing. I think most of us here agree on those points.
All that aside, I must recognize that the stories that are requested the most, and read the most, are the shorter stories. Most of our readers never post on the forums. They read and run.
If you desire only to write something that pleases those readers, you'll find keeping it brief but impactful is your best bet.
If, like me, you are writing for those few readers who really appreciate a long story with a real message, then don't shy away from the important details in your story. Investing in a good description can really bring a character or a world alive.
Just because MOST readers want a quick hit and run type story, does not mean ALL of us do.
P.S.
Most readers don't ever bother to hit those rating stars. We have had some difficulty with the hit counters, but I've seen the traffic stats of the site. We are getting Far FAR more hits on stories than we ever see rating stars.
Sadly, our Top Stories page does not reflect the real traffic the stories are seeing. I think those of us that appreciate a long tale, are in the minority that will actually rate a story we like.
As I said, most readers are of the Hit and Run variety. I don't write my stories with them in mind.
Last edited by Cainanite; 08-10-2012 at 06:42 AM. Reason: Added a P.S.
"Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth."
-Jean Houston
New eunuch stories can be submitted to eafictionarchive (at) gmail (dot) com
This is one of those situations that require a happy medium. To little description is like food w/out seasoning. But too much is even worse. Plot and characterization can be drowned by overgrown piles of description. I have great difficulty reading books or stories where the author writes like he is being paid by the word. I liked early Anne Rice (particularly "Cry To Heaven) but her later stuff is so wordy I can't read it.
Another point is that beginners often try to do descriptions by piling adjectives on top of adjectives, often in simple declaritive sentences. The sunset was crimson, vivid beautiful and moving. Often it is more effective to describe by analogy. The sun was blazing like a roaring blast furnace. its even better if you can show rather than just describe.
Transward
nil humanum a me alienum est
Adverb abuse.
Watch out for it.
I sometimes forget to check the level of interest or "like" by using the stars. I remember Greg and Peter and loved all three parts. Since my "favorites list is full I can't add that story to it.
Quick and graceful, I ran to the other room to search frantically but finally successfully for my old grammar book, then, as daintily and carefully as I could, I sat reading about adverb abuse; then with accurate, fast, light-fingered, zippy typing I entered this reply.
Dear overlord please do not viciously and horribly strike me dead for this post.
I apologize for my avatar.
Behold the Asshorn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14fXm4FOMPM
Schoolhouse Rock - Adverbs
Thanks for the post, which made me smile happily, knowingly and appreciatively.
You're welcome.
Sort of off topic, but the one you'll probably never find is the one with "Wonder Gram, Liter Leader," and someone else.
It was all about measurements, and DC comics went wild and nailed them for making fun of Wonder Woman. (Wonder Gram could change size, weight, etc.) I think that episode only ran for a few weekends, and while I've found several other episodes on Usenet and Youtube, I've NEVER been able to find that one.
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