I think once your novels stray into SF, you’re entitled to the special effects and the inspired chaotic! Take Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash: dense writing, off-the-wall concepts, each line containing a concept, which falls outside the normal frame of reference. Is all of it necessary for the story? Probably not — but as SF writers we tend to build new worlds…and this requires a lot of bricks…

I don’t advocate puffery, slack plot lines or self-indulgent exposition. But sometimes you need stuff inside your plot that does not drive the story along but creates that wonderful conjunctive dissonance that punches the reader between the eyes and makes him say “whoah”!

In Season of the Witch I have two witches, an information thief, a memory palace, remote viewers, African masks, a tarantula, a cat, a quest for enlightenment via techgnosis and…what did I leave out? Oh, yes — a diary.

Remember what Mae West said: Too much of a good thing can be wonderful…

Great to meet you guys!

Steve, I often discover that a throwaway detail stuck in earlier becomes crucial (even if only in small ways) later on. Thematic details can follow the same pattern, especially when I suddenly see how they sink into and color the narrative.

I know what you mean about constraint, though: when I wrote a Marvel comics tie-in novel there were all sorts of things I had to write in or leave out (and since the hero, Daredevil, is blind, I had to write his scenes using other sensory input, which was a fabulous constraint). It made the writing curiously swift and easy, perhaps because I was so focused on dealing with the constraints that I forgot to worry about some other things.

I do think the subconscious often adds things that wind up later to have been absolutely necessary. What I call Back Office Thinking–they don’t tell you what you’re doing until you need it.

And one thing Steve never, ever does, is put things into his stories that don’t strictly serve the needs of the story. Doesn’t matter how cool the special effect is. Doesn’t matter how much he’d love to throw in bells and whistles and kitchen sinks. If it doesn’t serve the story, no matter how much he may want it to be there for other reasons, it’s out. (He does like explosions; I’ll give him that. But in that case, he finds a way to make it have meaning.) He has tremendous self-discipline.

Hmmph. Stop, you’re making me go bright red.

But I think our subconsciouses are smarter than we think. I often add details that are not (apparently) serving the story. I don’t know how it relates. But then, at the end–son-of-a-bitch–it needed to be there all along.

I was halfway through this book when I was informed that a set design feature not in the script meant that Griffin, the character I was writing this backstory about, was a sketcher, an almost compulsive artist. He has drawings all over his place–the art department of the movie spent a couple of weeks just doing drawings so they could be taped, pinned, thumbtacked, etc, all over his lair.

So, I had to backtrack and add this ability and interest to what I’d written already and, boom, major plot points suddenly appeared in the next stuff I wrote that turned on drawing and images drawn and the process of drawing–sitting in one place long enough to draw.

As I said over at Eat Our Brains, this is the most constrained novel I’ve ever written, but, oddly enough, that really helps.

Finding the balance between something so stripped down it is little more than a stage set and endless descriptions of details that don’t actually matter to anyone but the writer - that’s a struggle for me. That, and figuring out the weight of information load in relation to how much the reader knows, how much the reader needs to know, and how much I know. My head hurts.

I heard it put this way: every scene must sit on the three-legged stool of plot, characterization, and setting. When I started holding myself up to such rigorous standards, writing took on a whole new perspective and joy.

Kate, your point about ambience is well taken… however, I see that sort of thing as very much in service of story. By “in service of,” I am referring to *all* the elements that make a story powerful, gripping, and the kind of thing you want to read (or watch) over and over.

On one level, I think I misled in the original post, by talking about movies. I was talking mostly about special effects, spectacle, and other clutter in prose. There is a kind of rigor that certain writers bring to their work that makes it so rewarding to read. I want to strive more toward that ideal in my own work.

Detail is an interesting issue. I once had a great quote by Akira Kurosawa (director of perhaps my favorite movie ever, Seven Samurai) in which he disagrees with the idea that every detail must serve the story. Sometimes, he says as I paraphrase wildly and no doubt screw up the entire thought, details build a sense of being or atmosphere or mood - which might be a way of pointing out that these intangibles are also part of the story.

However, having said that, I also struggle with the same issues you do, being one of those writers who tend to pile on things and get geekily caught up in the background. I also, in my current WIP, am struggling to pare down details to those which, well, serve the story.

We should wish each other luck!

I think that a lot of movies place more value on controlling the audience’s emotion rather than create a rigorous narrative. I was watching a David Lynch movie (the one with Naomi Watts–I can’t remember the title and my job allows me to type a sentence and a half between calls) when I realized that the movie wasn’t actually supposed to make literal sense. It was supposed to bring about a series of emotional reactions and to hell with the rest.

And then I began to understand much better all the things about movies that drove me crazy–the plot holes and dopey monsters and formulaic story beats. The movie audiences value the emotion more than story logic. That’s why we so often see the same story moments at just when we expect them: Mr. Right turns out to be engaged already, Mr. Big Corporate Boss turns out to be In On It All Along, Sidekick gets captured by Mob Boss, Skeptical Cops take away Heroes Silver Bullets.

So we get New! Bigger! Spectacle! laid on top of the same old forms. And poor sf/f has such opportunity for spectacle that it relies on it too much.

I’m with you on narrative laxity, though. I wish more people cared.