The wrong kind of details: the components of wonder (aka lmp's rant)

[Imladris]

An interesting thread and I somehow managed to plow my way through the whole of it....

What specific details are the right kind? What are the wrong kind of details? How much does it depend on the context of the story? How do you think the authors I've named so far handled this? What other authors are there to bring into the discussion?

As a few people on page one mentioned, the details should be subtle. If everything is described to the minutest detail, then that sense of wonder is destroyed because the author is showing off his knowledge. He's drawing attention to himself, in a way, and not to the story. Or he is telling you to look at water droplet in a whole sea of possibilities. Tolkien destroyed the wonder of the Silmarillion when he devoted an entire chapter to the geography of Beleriand. Too much detail...too much of the land revealed.

Myth/Faerie/Wonder must be veiled...they must not be disected and chopped to bits like some laboratory experiment. I believe that is where Marion Zimmer Bradley failed (miserably) in The Mists of Avalon. It is a well written story of Camelot -- yet the sense of mystery is lost in sordid details, and kingly nobility is destroyed with far too much attention to such things as blood lines.

I think that a main problem with modern fantasy/myth is too much attention (detail) to magic. Myth is not magic. Magic is a tool (at the same time though, it must not be mocked with details -- hence it becomes known and there is not magic at all). There is magic in Tolkien and Lewis, but that is not the main point of the story. Myth and wonder ought to point you to something greater.

I believe that George MacDonald pictured the sense of wonder perfectly in his sea of shadows in the Golden Key. Writer's should be like Mossy and Tangle...our stories are our search to find whatever beautiful thing cast that shadow.