Spent 3 hours on a single character's backstory that only appears once

I was working on a short story last weekend and got stuck trying to figure out why a random shopkeeper would be grumpy. Ended up writing two full pages about his failed marriage and lost dog, but he only appears in one scene to hand the hero a map. The whole story was supposed to be done in an evening but that detour ate up my whole Saturday afternoon. Has anyone else gone down a rabbit hole like that with a minor detail?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles_hall1mo agoTop Commenter

Man I spent four hours once figuring out what kind of tea a character would drink. The guy literally just answers a door and says one line. I knew his whole life story by the time I was done. That detour cost me my whole afternoon and the story still isn't finished.

gracec161mo ago

That's the kind of detour that happens when you actually care about the writing, @miles_hall. It always starts with something small, like what tea they drink, and then you're three hours deep on their childhood pet and their favorite color. Big life decisions work the same way though. You end up spending all this time on the tiny details and completely miss the bigger picture. Like when people spend a week researching the perfect couch and then their apartment floods a month later. The story never gets finished because you got lost in the details that don't really matter.

jason_lewis31mo ago

I read this article the other day that said writers spend something like 70 percent of their time on stuff that never makes it into the final draft. That four hours on tea fits right in there. It's like you're building a whole world in your head but the reader only gets a tiny glimpse of it. Still, I think that time is useful because it helps you understand who the character really is even if nobody else ever sees it. The hard part is knowing when to stop digging and just let the guy answer the door.