tl;dr — let no detail be inconsequential

Wouldn't it be ironic if I began this blog post by going off on an unrelated tangent about something else?

Anyway, back to my focus for today: tangential and discursive prose. Something that I am incredibly susceptible to, especially when I was a much younger, immature writer, and I still struggle with it. I was recently reading through "Autumnal Equinox" and "A Thousand Purple Stars" (because I'm a self-absorbed ho, I'm working on it), and caught myself throwing in random bits of prose or gratuitous scenes that didn't really belong. Mostly, this is a result of me not planning ahead or me thinking I want to do one thing with a scene, but then deciding much later that I want to do something else.

For example, in "A Thousand Purple Stars," I open up a chapter with Jinyoung checking his budget sheet and realizing that he's steering very close to going over it. I was trying to show that Jinyoung was both a very organized person who keep track his spending, but I was also trying to hint to readers why he might consider taking up Jisoo's offer to be a for-hire boyfriend. In the end, though, I feel like I didn't drive that point home. Nowhere else in the story were his financial burdens ever brought up again, so that particular scene just felt kind of... superfluous. 

Another thing that stood out to me as I was reading my old works was my decision to have Jinyoung live in a room in an elderly care home. Originally, I had plans to include a scene in which Jisoo and Jinyoung bond over a game night at the elderly care home, and the elderly residents impart some wisdom on the youngsters. That scene ultimately got scrapped, and now it looks like I stuck Jinyoung into that living situation just for the hell of it. Another non-essential detail that ultimately didn't even matter.

It doesn't just happen to me at the scene level, either. Sometimes I catch myself divulging in the very act of drafting itself. When describing a scene or a character's appearance, I sometimes catching myself going off on mini-tangents about things like a character's hair texture, or introducing a minor character just for the sake of including them in the story somewhere, even though they don't really influence the plot in any way. Of course, minor characters and cameo appearances are a thing and they can make the experience of reading really fun or lighten up the atmosphere, but I think they need to be used decisively. Otherwise, focusing too much on checking off a list of cameo appearances distracts from the main plot. Ultimately, that's where I want my readers' focus to be.

I firmly believe that good storycrafting means that no detail introduced becomes inconsequential. Anton Chekhov said that if you put a gun on the table in Act 1, it needs to be shot by Act 3. To put it in simpler terms, let every detail of your story say something. Whether it's to reveal character, further plot, foreshadow events, or convey theme or mood, let every scene and every detail be an essential part of the storytelling.