Telling Detail

Read 2 Corinthians 1-3

2 Corinthians 3:13 "And not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished:"

We can get carried away trying to describe what we see in our imaginations for our readers. We want them to be able to picture our scene in their minds, whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

But if we overload with too much detail, our readers will likely skip over all our hard work in order to get to the action. So we want to give our readers the telling detail.

The telling detail is what creates character in our settings. It’s the thing that makes this one different from what the reader is already familiar with—for instance a canopy bed vs. a twig bed.