: Re: Providing context without getting lost in Description I think one of the challenges I have faced the most often in writing books has been where to start. I tend to do a lot of flash forwards

@Tiffany377

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Too much non-chronological writing makes it seem like you're insecure about your build-up. It makes it look like you don't trust your reader to build up any kind of investment in a character, so you just fast-forward to unearned conflict then sloppily fill in the details later.

Action and intense scenes mean nothing if the stakes aren't adequately established. Really, the context and the action should be inextricably linked. An example would be this:

The bald man shot the fat man.

All right, this is serious, likely an injury or a death has come from this, but who cares? You need to have the context and the stakes prepared. Now onto the title question:

How to not get lost in details? Simple: While you the author know every little detail about a location, the reader should never know as much as you. This is known as the Iceberg Theory, and states that for ice to 'glide gracefully like an iceberg', there needs to be more context beneath the surface made clear only by how the visible part of the 'iceberg' acts.

Hence, you simply need to ask yourself: Is a scene necessary? What details need to be shown to build the context/character/theme that I want to evoke here? It's all about necessity; if a gun is described as on a wall in act one, it had best become relevant by act three, or there was no point describing it.

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