Delightful Dilemmas: Scents, Details, and the Troublesome Opposite of Writer's Block

From where I'm sitting, I smell roasting beets and potatoes that I chopped and seasoned myself, and the gummy, chalky smell of moisturizer on my skin. The sun is setting behind me, the sky is flossy gray; I have had a week full of good food and good company, and it promises to continue on through to Sunday. And for once, I'm sitting here with the urge to write, and half a dozen blog posts moving through my mind, and I am contemplating a dilemma that is the absolute opposite of the one I usually face: I've written too many words.

A bit of secret insider knowledge: short stories, in most magazines, run to about 7,000 words, with the majority of magazines preferring 5,000. The story I am working on currently, (very) tentatively titled "The Boys of Summer", has just passed the 10,000 word mark, and while I'm wrapping up, I'm not positive that I can prune this beast down to the point where it is the "right" length to be published by someone I'm not related to.

While writer's block is any writer's nemesis, its supremacy is rivaled and occasionally surpassed by another insidious pair of words: "word count". Talk about style, talk about substance, talk about how you're revolutionary or ironic or postmodern or whatever buzz word you want to slap on your manuscript—if you don't find a way to jump over the hurdle of word count (or the less common but equally intimidating page count) you will be like every other schlub counting his rejection letters and reminding himself how Elvis was told to give up singing. Magazines want two to seven thousand, publishing houses want around ninety thousand, agents want to see your novel explained in a page: getting published tests not only the quality and dexterity of your words, but their capacity to shrink down and hide when it comes time for roll call.

I suppose I could scream about "my art" and the myriad ways in which the publishing industry is keeping me "down"; but the truth is, I consider this another challenge to be met. "The Boys of Summer" feels like a ten, maybe eleven thousand word story—but how much of that is extraneous? Surely some of it can be set aside. But when I look at it, from the very beginning, I'm not sure how to find it. I see some loose language, but more than that, I see, colorful and mournful, that quality of a story which most often has to be thrown out when it needs to be downsized: the details.

A book I read on the art of writing fantasy, back when I thought those were a good idea, suggested that knowing the details and hidden lives of your characters is everything: that even if it never comes up, you need to know whether your main character prefers light mayonnaise to regular. Good advice, but it's very easy to lose track of the most important clause: "Even if it never comes up". Good use of detail is a pair of wings holding your story aloft; poor use of detail could ruin the next Slaughterhouse Five.

Detail is powerful; detail can tell the reader secrets in ways that broader actions and speeches never could. The magic of detail can come down to a single word: the difference between "he said" and "he drawled" and "he spat" is a sledgehammer of an example. I've read stories where the entire drama played out in one small series of descriptions floating just beneath the surface of the narrative. If I had the time I could spend hours searching for the perfect way to describe the color of this character's eyes or the curve of that character's mouth. I could waste a night striving to make the motions of a sunset into a typographic Sistine Chapel.

But is it worth it? Is it acceptable for me to write the most amazing description in the world, and shove it into a story as full and three-dimensional as an envelope? Can I get away with hanging pretty drapes over the holes in the walls and pretending everything's fine?

See, there—I'm trying too hard to be clever. No. The answer is no, I cannot. Prose poems aside, people don't open a literary magazine to watch me make adjectives dance. Beautiful detail can accent a great story, but it can't make up for a poor one.

This isn't a diatribe against detail—far from it. But the truth is that, especially in short works, detail has to be used carefully. The word I want to use is "acrobatic": detail needs to blend without effort. Hair color isn't always important; eye color is mostly good for poetic license; preferred mode of dress can send a signal or can bog the story down while you describe the way the ruffles hang out of their sleeves. Description needs to be kept up in the air with all the other pretty scarves you're using to tell your story. Play with your words, but don't ever let word-play become all you do: if you can make mention of someone's hair color and keep the story flowing, go to it, but unless it's plot-relevant, don't try too hard.

And yet, for all this advice I spout, I'm in love with detail. I love finding the perfect word, and if it's grammatically incorrect in context that just makes me edgy; I find pretty and flowing ways to describe someone's perfect indie boy haircut or the starved-crow hang of their clothes, and I latch onto my cleverness and I don't let go. And God help me when I invent a mythos to hang in the background of a story—I find myself straining and wheedling to get just a little more detail about my Fantastic New World out in the open, where people can see it and say "My God, this man's a genius! At last, a home for this useless pile of money that's been holding down my paperwork!"

This is why "The Boys of Summer" is over ten thousand words long; this is why I can't seem to make my novel synopses fit on one page. I plunge my fingers into the minute cracks and contours of my stories, and I cling for dear life and insist that no-one, not even me (especially not me), can take them away. I sit here, contemplating the end of "The Boys of Summer", and wondering how much of the drama and the important choices can be distilled down—and how much of the backstory for my main character doesn't need to be there.

It's frustrating work, trying to trim a story down to size; and yet, when I look at it, it's frustrating work because it seems like every paragraph has some gem in it, some great twist of phrase that I don't want to consign to oblivion and forgetting. It's hard work because I put a lot of words onto paper, even just digital paper. And really, I just sat back and thought about that, and that is the exact thing I keep telling myself isn't happening. I claim it's not enough, I claim it's terrible—but even when it's like pulling teeth, I seem to produce something I treasure too much to throw away.

So instead of fretting, I'm going to let "The Boys of Summer" sit for a night, and enjoy the company of friends from out of town; and I'm going to be thankful that, if only for this week, the biggest problem with my writing is that I've produced too many high quality words.