The Little Details

For many, many years, I was a fan of an action-adventure TV series.   It had a science fiction flavor to it (at least a Hollywood version), and a great looking lead actor.  But it fell out of favor in the syndication department and didn’t see the light of day for quite a few years.  I think it was close to fifteen years before I was actually able to see it again, outside of some bad quality video tapes I had.  A couple years ago, it came out on DVD, so I immediately rushed out to buy the first couple of sets.

And was disappointed.

It wasn’t the 45-year old special effects.  Or even the story quality.  It was the carelessness of the details. 

Dumb things. 

I’m looking at a scene with a nameless actor in it and thinking, “You know, that guy died in the teaser.”   Or a senior military officer hopping on the radio to demand, quite uselessly, what the bad guys want with him.

The little details may not seem important–in fact, the producer of this show was well known for dismissing problems by saying, “No one will ever notice.”  For me, those insignificant details that “no one will ever notice” were noticable, and they kept kicking me out of the story. 

I’m not nitpicking here.  I kept getting derailed because I was seeing obvious careless details, often multiple instances in the same episode and often repeated in later episodes.  Now I honestly can’t say I’ve seen a published book with similar issues, though I do see it in unpublished fiction.

At times a novel can be overwhelming because there are so many details and so many places where it’s easy to forget what I said earlier and do something different.  At one point, I thought about doing some form of worksheets, but those seemed like a lot more work than I wanted to do.  I finally settled on a style sheet, which I’ve found very helpful.  Deanna Hoak has a post on them. 

What’s your method of keeping track of the details?