Tipsy Tuesday

By the very nature of the calling, fiction writers are liars. A good fiction writer, therefore, must be a good liar. Specific, concrete details in a story, as every good liar knows, is what's needed to persuade your mark (or your reader) that what you're telling them is the God's truth. If you provide your reader with a variety of sensory details and let them draw their own conclusions, they will be participants in your story and not merely observers.

And then you'll have 'em. Janet Burroway in her book Writing Fiction calls this significant detail. Significant detail is the sort of detail that means both what it says and also more than what it says.

If you want to write fiction, you not only have to mean what you write, but mean more than you write.