Ulff Lehmann's Blog: Blogging Lot - Posts Tagged "details"

or "How the hell is this relevant?"

I've been thinking a lot about how to write this one, and while I'm still not sure this is the right way, I just told myself "fuck it, let's get it over with..." So that I don't have to repeat myself again and can refer people to this bit of blog-wisdom.

If it is wisdom... you decide.

Now, I recently had a conversation with a few writers regarding details and how many to use, with me saying that we miss 80% or more of whatever the hell goes on around us. The reply I got was that they were paying attention to everything people wore etc. So I asked them something like this "When you go to work in a crowded rush-hour type morning, you will notice everything everyone wears?" To which I got a simple "yes" as answer. I think I said something like "Damn, you must never be on time... if you arrive at all."

Not sure if the people were seeing what I was getting at since I let the conversation rest. This ain't admitting defeat, but I don't like tilting against windmills... if I see someone not getting it I see no point continuing the conversation.

Now, details. Wherever one lives, I assume that other than just recently being cured from blindness or having just moved there people have lived there for a while. Meaning they have done the "sight-seeing" and while there probably are corners they have yet to discover, walking from one's apartment to anywhere familiar is like walking from the living room to the bathroom. Read, under normal circumstances you just don't give a fuck about the surroundings.

Now, entering a bar with friends waiting. With an even number of both sexes represented, and interest focused on finding one's friends, the details of what who is wearing fade into the background. Sure there are exceptions, but if you are meeting friends, your focus is on finding them.

Entering the same bar "on the prowl" is a different thing, but even then one follows a hunting scheme, dismissing everyone who does not fall into one's preferred category and those who are no "threat" which again leaves a majority of the people in the background, noticed only in order to not bump into them.

The same goes for getting to work, shopping, traveling, whatever.

We do not pay attention to everybody's clothes.

As I said somewhere else, for me the most important and compelling aspect in a story is the characters through whom I experience the world, their lives, their stories. So if I read a novel which flip-flops between 3rd person narrow and semi-omniscience on a regular basis, I usually put the book away. Why? Because I do not want to have a guide-narrated tour through a place... "and behold, to either side of the stream, the Argonath, the statues of the olden kings of Gondor..." bad example, I know, since Tolkien used the tour guide/omniscient narrator style anyways, but it serves to get the point across.

I live in a town which has a lovely medieval part that somehow survived WW II. Part of my apartment, the part I am currently writing in, has been built in 1713 or so, and there are buildings that have been standing for some 500 years or so. I live here. Guess how many times a day I stop and gaze at the beautiful wattle-and-daub houses. Come on, you know the answer... Zero times. But why? you ask. It must be beautiful, you say. Yea, but I fucking live here, I have been through this city so many times, drunk, sober, elated, depressed, talking with friends, watching girls, smoking, at day, at night, I don't fucking care ! I live here!

Now, were I to put a typical day of mine into prose, this is what would be in the text. Me searching for my shoes (thought I put them next to my chair last night, but I must have put them elsewhere). Me patting my pocket for my keys (which are attached to my jeans, I know, yet I don't wanna lock myself out, at all). Me opening the mailbox, noting that the state of its contents are still the same. Then I have a cappuccino, chat with the staff or read, ponder whether to buy some pastry afterwards and deciding against it, seeing that I'm kinda low on funds.

All this tells the reader something about the character(me). I am scatterbrained, obsessive yet uncaring towards any mess. A creature of habit who likes pastries but pays attention to money, or lack thereof.
An omniscient narrator could've summed it up pretty much the same way I just did, and we would've skimmed over it because it's boring. Seen through the character's eyes, things become more intimate, and yet they are not on the nose. What's even more interesting is that once a reader knows a character, they can tell what's out of character. If faced with some everyday thing, a character will not notice it, because he has seen it so many times.

I love GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire, but in the latest books he has gone out of his way to describe all the banners lining a sodding room's walls. Sure, Jon Snow might have noticed it, a few years ago, but the boss of the Night's Watch has a few more important things on his mind than to make a mental list of the banners! Fan service of the worst kind, a useless pointless detail that is utterly out of character for someone as pragmatic as Jon. And I'm pretty sure I was not alone in noticing it.

If something is new, details come to the fore, but even then our character noticing them is guided by necessity. Take the bar example and replace bar with cavern, and instead of waltzing in and looking for friends (or a potential lay) the character sneaks in and tries to free a friend. Will he notice the wall paintings or graffiti? Unless he huddles behind a rock upon which someone wrote a colorful insult that might make him stifle a chuckle, he will have his attention on the kidnappers, and possible silverware which might fuck up movement. He will notice weaponry, maybe identify the most lethal fighters, but he will not notice that the shoes of that warrior woman were made by the expert hand of Dolce'n'Gabba, the famous shoemaker!

So if anyone claims they pay attention to every single detail, I want to know the clothes of every sodding person they encountered during their ride on the subway on their way to work, including jewelry and shoes and perfume! The answer more than likely is "how the fuck should I know?" Which is exactly my point!

A couple days ago, I watched a rather scathing review of the last Indiana Jones movie... not that there's that many positive things about it... the reviewer made a terrific point when remarking that every act of violence was made "kid-friendly." There were bullet holes, sure, but the victims of random and directed violence were all rather bloodless.

Same thing with Star Wars, even though in A New Hope the arm sliced off by Ben Kenobi does lie there in a bloody puddle. To be fair, I would have expected the wound to be cauterized, but still. A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark do have a lot in common, same as Crystal Skull and the Star Wars prequels. The former, while not skimping on violence, do show the consequences, be it blood or holes in storm trooper armor, while the latter make it all seem like a big video game.

The same could be said about certain aspects of fantasy, more so than science fiction, but overall the level of violence displayed in certain volumes of the respective genre is made cartoonish by the lack of blood.

This ain't D&D or World of Warcraft! We expect a reader to suspend their disbelief about dragons, magic and whatever else, we invite them into the realms of our imagination, expect them to live and suffer with our characters, let them participate in the battles and skirmishes the protagonists may face, yet at the end we hold back...?

Why?

No, seriously... why? Sure, we provide an escape from the harshness of our world, but if you are like me, you will marvel at the daring of Paul Verhoeven who did not shy away from showing the very real consequences of equipping a prototype robot with large caliber guns and then have said robot go berserk on a manager.

Is the scene in the original Robocop nice? Fuck no! It's not meant to be nice, it is meant to be sickening! Most people will never get the irony of that scene. People will complain about the level of violence, yet support legislation that allows everyone access to guns that while not inflicting wounds as gaping as those in the film will still kill people. The irony is right there.

The glorious warrior cutting his way through waves and waves of orcs, yet in the end his clothes show only some sweat stains, if that. And then we expect our readers to buy into the pathos of said warrior elaborating on the grimness of war and the suffering and hardship... in his pristine, maybe sweat-stained, clothes.

Who's laughing at the stupidity? I am!

I have never swung a sword at a live opponent. Thankfully. But I have held a sword, hacked away at vegetation with it, and used an ax on wood. So I do have a vague idea how much force one brings to bear with such a weapon. Aside from cutting myself shaving, the tip of my thumb had a rather messy encounter with the revolving blade of a bread-cutting-machine, I caught a falling knife, received my fair share of blows to both body and head, and while none of that even comes close to being on the business end of a sword blow (thank fuck for that!) it does show how easy it is to draw blood, and not in the ouch-paper-cut variety either. So a cut -- not a swing, mind you -- by any kind of blade will leave you slightly bloodied, if not downright gushing, depending on the location. A full swing, unhindered by armor, will kill, and not in a PG-13 way, either.

And that is exactly the point, we tell stories, stories have meaning, or should have, and in the end we want to point to our tales and say "Here, this is the point I wanted to make, him looking out over the field, on which so many of his friends have died, where he lost his leg trying to save his brother, here is where he realized that wars fought over religion are shit. Here is where he realized there was no god, or if there was, he did not care one bit."

Sure, such a scene could've been written PG-13, with lots of bloodless death, and maybe the message would still have come across, but chances are that message will sound preachy because the reader has not suffered through the fighting, because the protagonist has only observed caricatures, bloodless avatars from his favorite video game go down, not his friends and neighbors.

I prefer blood and tears and pain and joy and regret over the scrubbed cleanliness of PG-13 any day of the week.