How to figure out the details?

Burroway has a lot of valuable information about details used in fiction writing. There is such an emphasis on the use of detail. I like Burroway’s thoughts because she goes deeper than average into the “whys” and “hows” of writing with good detail. I like how she says,

“And this is a more difficult task, because written words are symbols representing

sounds, and the sounds themselves are symbols representing things, actions, quali- ties, spatial relationships, and so on. Written words are thus at two removes from experience.” (p. 78)

These helped me to gain a different perspective as far as my approach to writing goes. The number one priority in writing is to create a believable circumstance. The most important word in that last sentence is “believable” because you can write hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing, but if it’s not believable your audience won’t engage. Burroway talks about the importance of using concrete details, which are details that your audience can “taste”, “smell”, and “hear”, etc. She also writes that choosing the “right” details is extremely important. This is where I get lost because I just don’t feel like I know what the right details are. The other day I was trying to describe my living room for one of my fiction exercises. As I was looking around the cluttered room I knew so well nothing stood out. There was no beacon of light shining in the darkness that called to me, “Put me in your description!” No I had no moment of epiphany. I ended up scribbling down details about the curtains and the stains on the carpets. What is an important detail? What kinds of details are the ones that grab hearts and call minds to attention?

When I read through the works of fiction for class the details stood out to me. They are things that are so seemingly unimportant; the details in life that are almost taken for granted. When I am cooking eggs I know that there is a smell that exudes from the grease, pepper, salt, and the eggs themselves. I know that the pan makes a crisp, crackling sound when the eggs make first contact. I also know that egg whites change color rapidly from a clear, gooey yellow to a pristine, solid white. I know all these details, but they don’t occur to me in a true sense. It is almost as if they only bombard my subconscious.

Sometimes I feel like there are too many details and in that moment choosing the one that gets the most priority seems intimidating. After reading Burroway I realized that you can change the feel of your story drastically simply by changing your details. Burroway gives two different descriptions of “Debbie” that each exudes the same characteristics, but in distinctive ways. In the first description Burroway writes,

         “Debbie would wear a tank top to a tea party if she pleased, with fluorescent

         earrings and ankle-strap sandals.

         ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Mrs. Chiddister would stand in the doorway wringing her hands.

         ‘It's not nice.’

           ‘Not who?’ Debbie would say, and add a fringed belt.” (p. 80)

In this description Debbie seems rebellious and spoiled. Later Burroway gives us a different description,

         “One day Debbie brought home a copy of Ulysses. Mrs. Strum called it "filth" and

         threw it across the sunporch. Debbie knelt on the parquet and retrieved her

         bookmark, which she replaced. ‘No, it's not,’ she said.

         ‘You're not so old I can't take a strap to you!’ Mr. Strum reminded her.” (p. 81)

Debbie seems much more quiet and less offensive. She seems small while her father lords over her. However, she still retains the defiance that the previous Debbie displays. We see this in her statement, “No, it’s not.” Both versions of Debbie display defiance, but they do it in distinct ways.  That is why I want to get a handle on my details. Right now I feel like my details are wild animals that are all running about in chaos. I wish to find the means to build a corral and herd them into what I want to say.

         Speaking of “corrals” reminds me of the story “Close Range” by Annie Proulx. Let me start off by saying that this story disturbed me. The ending was sad and creepy. Proulx told an interesting tale and at first I had no idea what was going on. It was only in the last few paragraphs that all the details came together for me. And Proulx used great details. In first paragraph I loved when she wrote about the scenery saying, “The wild country- indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky- provokes a spiritual shudder.” (p. 99) This is just beautiful language that paints a picture, not only of the physical aspects of the landscape, but also the feeling the landscape evokes. The details in this sentence also speak of the whole story. The word “jag” reminds me of a knife and “everlasting” reminds of how Ras would be maimed, in more than one way, for his life. His scars were “everlasting”. And when Proulx says, “provokes a spiritual shudder”, I think about the shudder that went through me at the end of the story. This one sentence is like a mini foreshadowing of all the following events. Good details are a great way to tie the whole story together.

         “Point and Line” by Thalia Field also had some great details in her story. I like Field’s story because she takes an extremely boring event and pumps it full of life. Throughout the whole story she is sitting in what seems to be a therapist’s office and nobody is talking. This goes on for a whole hour, but I was not bored. There is so much activity going on in the character’s mind that it doesn’t even matter that nothing actually happens in the story. One of my favorite parts of this story is when Field writes,

         “A moth saw a flame and thought what it saw was its heart and it said, ‘What is my

         heart doing over there, away from me?’ And believing that it could not be whole

         without an organ it never even used, the moth dove toward it, hoping to reabsorb it

         in open surgery, but instead there was a sound as empty as a lit match extinguished

         on water, and in an instant the heart that had stood away from the moth became the

         central unimagined ecstasy the moth couldn’t live without.”

When I read this I felt like it was a prefect example of a random thought that occurs in the mind when you let your mind wander. I was reminded of myself when I read this because I have weird thoughts like this all the time. I don’t know what connection this small story has to the whole, but I think it is a great little story in and of itself. I love how the moth is being personified and how it is questioning and longing for more. Maybe it is true that moths think that the light is the their heart. I mean the light must be a powerful object in their perception. I love how Field makes some important points through this small story. When she writes, “And believing that it could not be whole without an organ it never even used,” I got to thinking about how we humans think that way often. We think we need something to be complete, but it truly is unnecessary. Why fix something that is not broken? I love the line; “there was a sound as empty as a lit match extinguished on water.” This line is almost anticlimactic. The moth goes in for the light with hope and expectation and he just dies. There is no ceremony. He just dies.  I love that I can hear the sizzle of the match and that it directly connects, in my mind, to a vivid picture of the zapped moth. It is a great use of imagery.