Wheel of Time and Too Much Details

I’ve just finished reading the first book from the Wheel of Time and it was a disappointment. I went to read the reviews to find a confirmation bias, and sure enough when I filtered the one star reviews, I found some that agreed my view, that the book was too bogged down in details. There were other things I dislike, but that is for another time.

The book sometimes dwell on the details too much, describing how the leaf look in a forest. To give credit, this is not uncommon failings of a writer. When writing documents too, I have the same problem of how much detail I need to put into it. Sometimes I need to reduce the details, because it might confuse the reader. As Feynman put it, deciding how much too lie.

Sometimes the reader can understand all the details well enough, or even better than me. Instead, I need to reduce the details as they are superfluous. Sometimes the details detracts from the flow of reading and in the same vein, distract reader from the main content or purpose of the document.

It can also be other way around, where in trying to reduce the details, I miss out all the important details. So it is not easy to get the balance, as we all know. However I realised that the more I read good books/documents/articles, I can gauge a rough estimate of what would be considered too much detail and what is not. In essence, practice makes perfect.

As such, I’ll go and read another book, and I’ll not be reading any more books from the Wheel of Time series.

Thank you for reading.