The Devil Is In The Details
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Most fiction written today is boring. It all reads the same. No one is distinctive from another. This is not just a failure to find the author’s voice, but it is also a failure in the use of the details within a given tale. They are overdone, underdone, or done poorly, if not all three.
Make stuff happen.
We need constant action. The scene from The Last Tycoon with Stahr and Boxley where the tycoon gives a writing lesson to the writer is a good point to remember here (that scene was in an article I posted on Show, Don’t Tell. You can read it if you click here). Great writing is more than anything else a recording of action. I’ve often described great fiction as interesting people doing interesting things. And this bends back to the absolute rule of Show me, don’t tell me.
When I’m reading a book, I don’t want to read the personal rantings of the author as if he has crossed over into philosopher. And I don’t care what’s in the mind of the character. Show me what he’s thinking by his actions. Moreover, don’t tell me a certain person is feeling this or that. Display that emotion with actions.
What reads better? A person was angry, or they crumbled the letter in two white-knuckled fists, closed their eyes so tightly that it made the eyes hurt, and his red face shook until he screamed. The second shows anger with action and the first is the dreaded adjective that is the most empty calorie of words in literature.
Take Notes
The best writers are not so much creative as they are observant. Watch life around you and take notes of everything. I have a notepad function on my phone, and of course, I have my phone with me at all time. Whenever I see or hear something interesting, I think, That’s going in a book. I can’t remember them all regardless of how interesting they are, so I have to write them down if I’m going to use them. Even if I do not have any work in progress that would accommodate a particular statement or action, I may in the future, so I’ll saved the unused in a file.
It’s these little gems that add flare to the text and make your characters more interesting. We need to do all we can to make the text interesting or people will not read our stuff. Elmore Leonard famously said that he tries to leave out the stuff people skip through. Good advice for us. But not only leave out the dull parts, make sure to fill our pages with interesting stuff.
Speaking Of Interesting Stuff
Start with your own life, then go to extremes. Remember, “All fiction is biography, and al biography is fiction.” Hemingway and Shakespeare and Homer all wrote from what they knew from their own lives, independent from whatever story they were telling. That is, if such things can truly be independent from ourselves and our writing. All we encounter shapes us, which means it shapes our creativity.
So when you write form your own life, what you have done and what you have seen, use the things that are different, even outlandish. The things we all do may be worth noting as it is action, but the unusual things people do are the things worth noting in our lists and worth adding to our stories. For example, I once saw a woman lick the skin of an apple before she took a bite. I took note immediately and it found its way in my next short story. And who knows, but I may want to put it into a novel some day.
Notice details others usually miss. Unusual is interesting. But don’t make your narrative a laundry list of details. Use only those details that help tell the story, just make them spectacular. Some people think of details as the particulars of physical description as opposed to the details of people’s actions. I don’t want to know every bit of how a room looks. I only use any detail of physical description when it helps tell the story. This can be a detail about the scenery or how a person looks. We need these details, but not every cotton-pickin’ one of them.
You may have seen before the bit about the blue curtains in the novel, and some English professor goes on about the symbolism of the blue curtains, but the only thing in the author’s mind is that the curtains are blue. I don’t like that. If that’s the case, that means some author is wasting details that have nothing to do with the story. Any detail about a person or the scene can by symbolic, or a metaphor, or possibly a portend. If you use a description, make it useful. To try otherwise is lazy and ineffective writing. When it comes to great writing, the devil is indeed in the details. We need to use them, use them carefully, and use them deliberately.
