Details – I think I get why I like them so much, now

I’ve always been somewhat of a detail junky – and by detail junky I don’t mean paragraph after pointless paragraph that describes Aunt Bertha’s old oak table in loving detail for no reason other than to wax poetic. By “detail” I mean giving me a little more than “and character B was shot in the side” and that’s all we get. By side do you mean the ribs? Under the ribs? above the hip? To the right side of the abdomen? The left side? Lower? Upper? Was a lung hit? Were the intestines perforated? What do you mean?!

And I used to think that, maybe, I was making a mountain out of a molehill, being too demanding, and that the author could provide as little detail as they wanted to because it didn’t matter.

Then I read this article on movie heroes that should be dead (and I wish I had the link, it was quite interesting), and realized that, no, I’m not being demanding. Because you can’t just have your character shot in the side and be done with it, and also that abdominal wounds are the last place you want your character injured if you want the injury to be something easily taken care of. Details such as the location of a wound matter and matter a lot. They are the difference between your character staggering on heroically or lying on the ground dying from rapid blood loss and septicemia. They are the difference between a reopened injury being a nuisance and a reopened injury being a life or death situation.

So now I get why it always bugged me when someone would say “character was shot in the side” and not give us much else. And why it annoyed me when people would go for abdominal wounds as though they were the easiest wounds to take care of. Because they’re not!

Details matter, dang it. And telling me that someone was shot in the side isn’t telling me anything at all.