Injecting Minutia

Minutia. What makes a story truly come alive are the little things, the small details that make characters stand out and places memorable.

Creating an overarching plot or a complex background for your characters in a story, and for that matter the characters themselves tends to come fairly easy. I'm sure most writers whether pro or hobbyists would agree. Most of us able to jot down a handful of ideas that we'd like to come back to at some point or other to turn into a story.

What often lets our stories get left in the deepest darkest corners of our laptops or scribbles on a pad is that they fail to capture our interest. Often even the most interesting plots get sidelined in favour of ideas we end up writing about.

I believe that ideas we tend to carry forward are the ones we spent more time thinking of little quirks that capture our attention like they do that of a reader.

Here's the problem, thinking of minor details often comes easiest in a process I call Injecting minutia. Once you have written the basic shell of a story it's time to go back on the hugely entertaining job of editing. A truly long and tiring journey it is, but that is the time to develop and sneak in some gems or nuggets of information to keep people reading. Little rewards that for having read another chapter you now found out about X which links to Y which you read about earlier.

It was only the other day while thinking of a story and basically joining the dots. So one character's ex wife lives in a town visited by another character. Has a lover. Wait a minute. What if he was her new lover?

It seems only elementary but seriously I find this the easiest way for getting some juicy bits in the story. Maybe there's an easier way. I'd love to know because it would help to get a better grasp of what stories were worth bothering with at all. Or perhaps all stories could be good, given the time and energy to put in the little details.