Which Details Matter?
It’s easy to recognize when a child has edited their writing. Instead of a rambling story that jumps oddly from one apparently unimportant moment to another, you get—a rambling story that jumps oddly from one unimportant moment to another … with lots of completely irrelevant details.
In graduate school for education, I was given a sample paragraph by an elementary student about a trip to Disneyworld. The story began with the airport: “We used the curbside check-in and watched a movie on the plane.” The piece was already marked up with red pen for us to learn from. What did the well-meaning teacher do? Encouraged the student to add: “What is curbside check-in? What movie did you watch?” The student’s next draft was just as uninteresting as the first, but it included a more thorough description of the process of checking luggage, the name of the Disney movie they’d watched, and why it was a favorite.
Of course none of those details was either important or interesting—the writer should have cut the whole section! A story about Disneyworld doesn’t start when you get in the taxi outside your door—unless you’re already running late and nearly miss your plane. It starts at DISNEY! Preferably not even when you arrive at Disney, but when you’re well inside the park and doing something.
On the other hand, a high-schooler might write, “We went to Disney for spring break. I spent a day at Epcot, a day at Universal, and a day at the Magic Kingdom, riding all of my favorite rides from when I was a kid. My family had a great time together and we all felt more relaxed when we got home.”
One story tells us far too much about the trip. The other doesn’t begin to scratch the surface.
Every detail doesn’t matter, but some details matter quite a bit. How do you start to recognize which are which?
Of course, I can’t give you a list of Details that Matter. If it were that simple, I could teach the elementary-schooler to do it! Instead it’s a question of discerning how the same detail might matter sometimes but not others. Do I need to know it was a sunny day? I don’t know. Are you writing about an outdoor event? Had you wished for good weather? Did you see it as a “good omen”? Or was it unbearably hot? Was it a particularly beautiful day in an otherwise rainy October, or a sparkling sunny day in snowy January?
You can’t cross-examine each detail as you are writing. It will distract you from telling your story, not to mention irritate you. In the early draft, you actually want to follow the lead of the elementary-schooler and over-saturate with possibly irrelevant details. If you think of it, put it in.
Don’t ever follow the lead of the hypothetical high-schooler. That draft was organized, in that it briefly summarized events and wrapped up with a shallow conclusion. But if you edited out the uninteresting parts, you wouldn’t be left with anything. That’s why it’s important to prioritize ideas over organization in the first draft.
If you wrote a 300-word draft of a 650-word Common App essay in English class this spring and feel like you can’t imagine making it longer, it might be time to see what working with a coach can do for your writing. Schedule a 15-minute consultation and let’s find the rest of that story!
(Photo by Marco Xu on Unsplash)
