In the Details

 In the Details

By Bobby Neal Winters

Have you seen the meme of the Venn Diagram with the three overlapping circles? There are a number of variations of it. In one the three circles are labeled respectively “Bank Robbers,” “DJs,” and “Preachers” and the region of overlap is labeled “Raise your hands!”

I propose yet another variation on this.  Label the circles as “Good Teaching,” “Good Writing,” and “Good Story-telling.” In this case the common overlap would be “The Right level of detail.”

I’m a big fan of the series Derry Girls on Netflix.  It is set in Northern Ireland during the troubles in a Catholic girls school.  It is hilarious.  It is also irreverent and crude. Neither of those words were chosen lightly, so if you decide to watch it, please keep that in mind.

That having been said, there is a character named Colm who I feel like I know.  Indeed, I suspect that we all know him.  When we are introduced to him, he tells a story about being kidnapped by the IRA and having his car stolen. And he manages to make it boring.

Seriously, the story is torturous. It is about a subject that one would think to be objectively exciting. The characters and the subject are both dramatic, but in telling his story, Colm puts in such a level of--and this word is important--extraneous detail that you find yourself screaming, “Get to the bleeping point!”

If you are a fan of the old TV series “Monk,” Monk’s talkative neighbor Kevin Dorfman provides us with examples of this as well.

Of course, the writers of these series provide them for the sake of humor.  It is funny to watch polite people suffer impatiently while these people get their stories out, but it is a mirror for me.  When am I doing the same thing?  Something to think about, but not too much because I might stop talking entirely.

This happens in writing as well.

For many years, I edited a newsletter which often included items from scientists.  As with Colm who was mentioned above, they would often have a story that was about an objectively interesting topic but insist upon a level of detail that would put off the reader. 

One that I recall was about work the particular scientist had done on a topic connected with clean energy. The newsletter was for a general audience, but in his write-up, he had included graphs.

As the editor, I went through and I took his graphs out.  Having done that as well as some other editing, I sent it back to check if the new version was still accurate.  He put the graphs back in.  I took them out again and didn’t let him look at the final version.

This highlights an important aspect in finding the correct level of detail: audience.

You have to consider who your audience is.   When you are writing for a scientific journal, you need the graphs, you need the tables, you need the jargon. When you are writing for a general audience, you need to boil your story down to its quintessence. Just the cracklings, no more fat than that.

Now we come to what got me started thinking about this: teaching.  I have started to put together a course on low-level programming. In this context, low-level does not mean easy.  It refers to programming a computer closer to the nuts and bolts (closer to the circuits would be more accurate, but it’s not as familiar a metaphor) of the computer.

At its very base, computer programming is herding a bunch of varying voltage levels back and forth through the circuits of the computer.  In the old days, they used machine language and flipped physical switches.  Then they invented something called assembly language which allowed the programmer to get away from flipping the switches. After that came higher-level languages like C, Basic, Cobol, Pascal, Python, etc.  (That “etc” is doing a lot of work.)

The vast majority of programming is done in the higher-level languages, but they are all built on what went on below.  They are easier to learn because they encapsulate much of the detail in memorable ways.

The other day I was discussing boring story-telling with some friends of mine at Signet. Someone there pointed out that some writers could make having a high level of detail workout for them. I have to concede that--even after all I’ve written, but the detail has to be encapsulated in memorable ways. 

To be able to do that is an art.

I will be thinking about all of this as I put my new class together.  I don’t want to be a bore, but considering the subject, I might have to become an artist.

We shall see.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.