Non-Fiction Detail

As a non-fiction family history writer, the issue of an appropriate level of detail is something I grapple with constantly - how much is too much?

For example, when reading Brenda Niall's (non-fiction) biography of Georgiana Macrae, Georgiana, I frequently found myself bogged down in some very dense material and carried forward in the progression of the story only by the chapter headings. Yet Ken Follett's (fictional) novel The Pillars of the Earth, containing masses of detail about the techniques used to build medieval cathedrals, managed to keep my interest engaged for over 1,000 pages.

This raises another vexing issue - the need to balance 'explanations' against the overall length of a book. I belong to a family history writing group, where the members provide each other with an informal critiquing service and constantly demand that more information be provided: more descriptive details of a place, or an occupation, etc. This form of micro-analysis might improve one page, but taken to an extreme will make for a very long and boring book at the macro-level. Is this level of research effort and detail warranted if there's not much of a story to tell in the first place?

As a writer I try never to forget the golden rule I learned as a maths teacher many years ago - the need for each lesson plan to be built around conveying and reinforcing one idea at a time. Writers also need to be rigorous in their self-assessment of the intellectual idea or concept they are trying to convey in any one publication - its underlying premise.

Such considerations guide my decisions about the actual content of any single book. Sometimes I follow the more traditional format for a family history, providing short snippets about individuals while following a family line down through many generations, as with the Pierssené and Dennis books. In other cases, where I have a great deal to say about an interesting individual, I narrow the focus of the entire book to that one person. Robert Forrester, First Fleeter and Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter are examples. Southwark Luck adopted a hybrid format - with half the book devoted to one man and his wife and the remainder telling much shorter stories about each of their children. Each of the latter chapters could have been much longer, with more extensive research, but then the book overall would have been far too long.

Trying to streamline a story by shortening (or removing) unnecessary descriptions, by moving extraneous detail to appendices and endnotes, or by deleting material altogether, creates a whole new set of problems - will the readers follow your train of thought? As one of my writing friends expressed so succinctly: 'For every shortcut, a reasonable question follows' (in the minds of readers).

All of this just goes to show that the act of writing a book is a high-level intellectual endeavour, requiring the writer to make constant value judgments about the words being committed to the page and the impact of each word on the reader.