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Blogs by Jerome Parisse
Of the importance of detail
5/28/2010 3:48:07 PM
So this is it! My first blog. Ever! I spent a good part of yesterday building the tool and its structure, but was too tired by the end of it to start blogging straight away. This morning I woke up with anticipation and here I am, at the keyboard, in a mixture of fear and excitement.
I have just finished reading the third book of the famous Stieg Larsson Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest). Yes it took me a while. I enjoyed the books, don’t get me wrong – I couldn’t put them down, even if I found the third one not quite at the same level as the other two (Trilogies… maybe this will be the subject of another blog) - but as I turned the last page I started reflecting on what I liked and what I didn’t, something I always do with books. This is the writer in me and I have long stopped trying to justify it. When one starts to write and indeed learn how to write, one thing you keep hearing all the time is detail, detail, detail. Blocks of detail. There is no denying that filling your writing with meaningful detail is indispensable, and in fact, gives your writing an edge, an element of truthfulness that wouldn’t otherwise exist. But the important word here is meaningful. Far too often in Larsson’s books I found myself glazing over, reading through an excruciating amount of detail that I simply did not need to know! For example, the background behind the “Section”, or “The Wennerstrom Affair”. When this happens at the beginning of the book, this is deadly. And this is exactly what’s happening here. Books one and three especially take forever to take off. Once they have, they’re there for the long run, but you have to leave the tarmac first. Another example of too much detail is when Lisbeth Salander goes to Ikea to buy furniture. Why do we have to go through the Ikea catalogue, with detailed references for each item, before Lisbeth can finally furnish her twelve room apartment? Do we need to know the brand and memory size and other features of the computer she’s about to buy? Probably not. By the end of the first book, if someone mentioned to me coffee or open-sandwich, I would have jumped at their throat. Do Swedes really drink that much coffee, at any time of day or night, at least thirty cups of day, and do they only feed on open sandwiches? I doubt it (and in fact I know they don’t.) By the end of the first book, I think all the protagonists are totally coffee’d out because they don’t drink as much of it in the second installment. But they surely start missing it because here they are again getting their coffee fix in the third book (and more open sandwiches). They are also extremely lucky – especially when you consider the vast quantities of coffee they drink – to always hit the pillow and fall asleep straight away!
All this to say one thing, beware of the detail you write about: it’s got to be meaningful, and right – and not repetitive. I can’t help wondering if some more editing wouldn’t have been necessary. Maybe Larsson’s untimely death is the reason why it wasn’t done? I loved the books. Probably wouldn’t read a fourth installment right away, but loved them nonetheless and did learn something from them. I now wish I had read them in Swedish (I can read Swedish). It’s a shame we have lost such a great author so early.
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