User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/Writer's Workshop/@comment-1874924-20100419020048

To elaborate on one of Emmy’s points, rich narrative detail doesn’t necessarily, or even usually, mean minute detail. Details, like characters, should only be present if they have a reason for being there.

SPOILER ALERT: People who haven’t yet read Legacy might want to skip the rest of this post until they have read the story.

For example, in the first chapter of Legacy I spent a great deal of cyberink describing the changes in the camp and in Heather herself. The purpose was to set an autumnal mood (the adjective form of “autumn”, for those who don’t know the term) befitting a story that is mainly concerned with events that took place many years before. Likewise, I directed the reader’s attention—not once, but several times—to the fact that Heather is pregnant. This detail might have seemed superfluous at first, but it set the stage for Heather’s gesture of remembrance, which is the story’s dramatic climax and the event to which the title refers.

The violent scene in the second chapter is graphic for a reason, and it’s not to slake the reader’s bloodlust; it’s so ensuing events would be as realistic as I could make them. Likewise, the description of Gwen’s wound—one of the most, if not the most, graphically bloody scenes on the wiki—served two dramatic purposes; and to my mind, these purposes were vital enough to outweigh the risk that the scene might be offputting to some readers (like Sprink). First, it underscored that Hatchet’s attempts to save Gwen were going to be futile. Second, the modifiers “dreadfully”, “ghastly”, and so on emphasized that, despite Heather being Gwen’s enemy, she didn’t find Gwen’s distress in any way satisfying, and the reader shouldn’t, either.

In the final chapter, my purpose in describing what Heather and Duncan had for lunch was to end the story with the same “slice of life” quality with which it began.