Details! Details! Details!
I was discussing this with my editor a few days ago. We were going over some books and what work proofing needed to be finished. We began to get into the details of some of the books. One thing I wanted to make sure he did when going through the books was to look for details that were unnecessary. As it had turned out, he'd already found some superfluous details in one of the earlier books that I'd take care of. That brings me to the point of this entry: details!
It's important to have details with happenings or backgrounds in your writing. But at times, you won't need it. I once read a book by a fellow writer who had self-published his book. I couldn't get through the first chapter. The book had started out with a military battle with ground troops. He described in excruciating detail what was happening from start to finish. What should have been, in my mind, maybe a one or two-page event was about a thirty-page event. I wasn't alone in this assessment. The friend who loaned me the book state that same thing about the book. Now before you think I have to come down to reality in thinking I don't write like that: you're right! I like to think that I rarely write like that, but I imagine I do.
I Don't Care About Your History
A co-worker and I were discussing writing. He'd claimed he had written for a number of online sporting sites as well as some local music reviews. He could string together words coherently while speaking, so I had no doubt that it was possible they could write something people would read. We were discussing the backgrounds of characters in books. He flat out stated that, as a writer, you should know the name and family and entire life-history of every character in your book. I disagreed. His idea was that by doing that, you would be able to step into the shoes of every character like putting on a coat, hat, and gloves. I disagreed vehemently for one simple fact: why would I care if the protagonist was mean to her brother in the third grade because he broke her toy diaper bag?!
If the co-worker would write and ended up doing that very thing, he would end up writing enough details of every character that could fill another book. Now no doubt you want to have a certain amount of background information for each relevant character in the book. But for characters that come and go and are only as relevant as a plot point, their background isn't necessary.
An Example
Here is an example of when you don't need details. Suppose you're writing and you have a character come into the book as a waitress in a restaurant that one of your characters is going to eat at. Do you really need to know the entire back history of that waitress who appears in maybe three spots over ten pages? No, you do not. You can have a simple observation about her: "she's obviously spent her youth taking drugs and partying as witnessed by her deep crow's feet and dirty blonde stringy hair." A character observation isn't digging into the background of that character. It's a plot point. In this example, its to set up the type restaurant the character is currently eating at, which would obviously be some kind of dive.
My point is, you don't need to know anything about characters who appear on the page for a sentence or two. Is it nice to add some flavor to describe them to set up the ambiance on the page? Yes, it is. But you don't need to know the waitress dropped out of high school at seventeen because she was pregnant. Unless it's relevant to the plot. You don't even need to know the waitress' name. Unless it's relevant to the plot. You can keep the details as vague as possible and only delve deeper when it is... what? When it's relevant to the plot.