“The man drove his car to work.”

“Michael Jones was nervous and thought about the Play Doh in the toilet as he weaved his Ford Focus through traffic, late for the staff meeting at his office at Plexo Industries.”

The more I read the writings of recognized authors, the more I am reminded that one of the qualties of a good story is that it is anchored in details.

Details help provide the story with plausibility. Vagaries often keep us from fully engaging with the characters and the plot because they minimize what we can relate to in the tale. Details draw us in to the composition.

Details help to establish and clarify the setting of the story, and when the specifics are products or places familiar to the reader, they can provide suggestions about the interests, motivations, and character of the protagonist. But they also lend familiarity to the reader. We can make a few assumptions about the main character if they eat faithfully at Taco Bell three times a week. We also are given some insights into a guy if he drives a Mercedes C-Class, or if he drives a Dodge Charger. Specific, quantified, named and known item appearing in a sentence can suggest to us a character’s preferences, culture, apprehensions, locale, and identity.

So, details give strength to a story, and add to the reader’s vision.

The challenge with details, though, is that they require work. Unless you are technically-oriented or a master at Trivial Pursuit, the more specific you get about items or equipment in your stories, the more you have to know about those items or equipment- how they work, where they are made, where they are defective, why they are used, etc. – because all of that metadata potentially adds to and alters the story. If you include a car brand or a computer model that did not exist when your story alleges to take place, to the careful reader in the know you have undercut the story’s plausibility (unless the story is utterly science fiction), which affects its readability.

As they say, “the devil is in the details”. Mostly, in making sure you have conveyed them correctly.