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Old 03-06-2010, 09:41 PM
sic1701 sic1701 is offline
sic1701
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Omaha, NE
Posts: 93
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Just don't "Clancy-fy" everything, where you give mind-numbing details that detract from the story.

I loved "Red October", but noticed with each succeeding book he went into more and more detail that required you to pause the action in your mind while he taught you Weaponry 101.

A perfect example is the nuclear detonation scene from "The Sum Of All Fears", where after some five or six pages chronicling the first few hundred milliseconds of the nuclear detonation he then tells us the effect it had on the Super Bowl and the fans, which is what I really wanted to know. I don't care HOW tritium boosts a nuclear yield, only that it does. For the story, I needed to know that something went wrong and the yield didn't get boosted into the thermonuclear range, for that had significant plot implications as the book went on, but I didn't need five or six pages telling me WHY and HOW it went wrong. A paragraph would have sufficed.

Now, when you're in the research phase of your writing, no detail is too small to go unnoticed for such detail may lead you into deeper thinking, plot twists, other things you didn't think of before. But when you're actually writing something you want others to read, there is a fine line between not enough information to satisfy your reader and trying to teach your reader how to wire a nuclear bomb.
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