Setting: Emphasize One Detail

Question: Why is it important to emphasize just one detail in a scene?

Answer: Remember all the bits of insight I give you about writing are just guidelines. You as the writer gets to choose when you use them. There might be a scene where you need to describe the entire room, for example, your apartment is broken into and everything is trashed. You decide whether you emphasize one detail and show the reader the emotional impact of that one detail, or if it is best to give an overview of the setting.

Maybe you pick the one thing in that room that was most important to you and focus on your emotional connection to that one thing and how it feels to have it destroyed. Based on your experience, you need to determine which approach would work best. Do we need to see the entire room, or do you lead us into connecting with that one thing so we feel what it was like to lose it?

The reason I say to focus on one detail is because if you focus on a general description, it doesn’t allow us to SEE anything. We know where we are but we have no connection to it. For example, you can give a description of going to get the mail. You let us know that we are walking down a country road toward a group of mailboxes. We know where you are but we have no feeling about how the setting or space feels or relates to you.  Lets say you decide to take one detail-the mailboxes. It might go like this.

I stood rooted at my communal post drop, where rickety wood boxes hovelled together attached to a central metal pipe. A few were covered with hand painted mosaic tile, one had wood cut in the shape of a horse head, and another was dappled with colorful rocks. Mine was plain in comparison; the whole box was painted blue. It was these boxes that made me stay here. Every time I thought of moving, I’d go and look at the boxes and remember my crazy, supportive, last minute, communal neighbors who would make the trek up to my door to check on me if my mail was left for a day.

One good detail can set you in the scene in a way that a general description does not.

I can give you guidelines, to push you to look at things from a different way, but in the end you are the writer and the choice is always yours. So take what I say and use what works for you.