When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Interpretation
Perfect details in a story may indicate a lack of authenticity or depth.
Charles Baxter suggests that when every detail in a narrative aligns flawlessly, it can signal an artificiality or contrived nature in the storytelling. Real stories often possess imperfections and contradictions that reflect the complexity of human experience, which makes them more relatable and genuine.
In practice
During a writing workshop, this quote could emphasize the importance of embracing imperfections in character development.
Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.
You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.
It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Beauty stands In the admiration only of weak minds Led captive.
Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
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