Writing Tools: Details Matter!

Book Card for The Stormy Love Life of Laura Cordelais created by Susan Hanniford Crowley using Canva

Details matter! Why?

A detail can spin the plot in a new direction. It can tell you something deeply hidden in a character.Details that have an emotional impact on the reader keep a person reading. Keep your details small and need to know.Use the details to move the plot forward. Avoid mundane details that are not necessary to the plot.Write memorable details that are exciting, gratifying, and strong. Details should convey the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feeling.

Details enrich your storytelling within scenes and characters. It brings the story to life! With great and pleasurable details, you can feel haunted by a forest draped in gray moss obscuring the light and smells of decomposition. The mist magnifies sounds, so you feel surrounded. What the character feels is expressed in how they feel about a place.

Here is an excerpt from The Stormy Love Life of Laura Cordelais, so you can see what I did with details.

*

“Hey, lady!  Don’t!”

The deep, bass voice reminded her of that exact moment when she knew nothing mattered anymore. That voice shouted for her not to jump.  Familiar.  It sounded so familiar, much like the cab driver who took her here.  After her life spiraled downhill.  Mugged.  Purse stolen.  Her precious art strewn about. She had nothing left.  Nothing, except the control of life or death.  

Laura lost herself, lost her will to trudge another day, lost the hope she always saw in her mother’s eyes.  Her heart fluttered.  I want to die.  I don’t want to be hurt anymore.  

She couldn’t stop crying, and the night sky opened up in sympathy.  A police siren blared.  Its rolling red lights blurred in the downpour like a watercolor painting.  Life was washing away.  Laura moved one foot into the air as if testing it.  Her chest ached.

I don’t really want to die.  An ember of hope still burned in her.

She twisted, holding on with one hand, while the other reached.  She tried to grasp the rail.  Her foot slipped.  Her hand released.

Plunging into the darkness, fear rose inside while regret surged.  She really didn’t want to die!  God, help me!  When she hit the wetness, she grasped at nothing.  Nothing while the black water engulfed her in its depths.

Drowning hurts.  She gasped and fought for air but lost her direction. As she floated down, her head filled with half images of family.  Just as she focused on one picture, it would melt away.  Her hands grew cold.  She couldn’t feel her feet.  Her lungs burned.    

So this was dying.

*

“Thanks,” David said as he handed the driver his fare and watched the cab pull away from the curb into the rainy night.  The cab’s passenger, an attractive young woman, would wake the next morning with a slight feeling of euphoria but otherwise no memory of their evening together.  David grimaced to himself.  He could do with some euphoria.  

Then he looked across the street and sighed.  There it was.  A hotel stood in place of the family home his father built in 1857.  He missed his mother and brothers.  William and George, his older brothers, died in the war.  David was supposed to die at Gettysburg, but that vampire . . .  He closed his eyes to push away the memory that hurt so much.  His honor was robbed that night when his blood seeped into the battlefield.  That ghastly, white face stole his humanity with a single bite.  

He shook his head studying the building.  He took a room there once. He wanted to feel his mother’s gentle presence.  He had been desolate.  He needed her so the loneliness wouldn’t eat him.  But David found nothing.  No presence.  No feeling the family ever existed.

Heavy rain beat down on him, but David remained untouched by a single drop.  Pain, however, still reached through time to touch him.  

“You are a deserter.  You are no longer my son.”

The image of his little brother Thomas waving from an upstairs window.  A hand-painted, wooden soldier David left on the back porch for the boy.

It was over that fast.

David walked down the street in the rain.  While his hunger was satisfied, his longing was not.  Blood was not enough anymore.  Lust for strangers left him empty.  David wanted love, and deep in his barely beating heart, he asked, God, take pity on a vampire.  

Pain seared through his chest.  He fell to his knees.  David shook his head knowing vampires did not have heart attacks.  Trying to stand, he froze.  A vision.  A woman falling.  Despite the pain, he heard her cries and took to the air, then plunged into the East River.

A million contradictory thoughts ran through his brain, one being that he shouldn’t be in salt water, but he dismissed them all.  He had to find her.  A flash of gold caught his eye.  He rushed toward it, found her, and pulled her to the surface.  She didn’t stir.  He pressed her face to his.  She’s so cold but so soft.  He sighed.  Her lips are blue!  Holding her tightly in his arms, he exploded from the water and minutes later landed across the street from a hospital.  

I’ll just give her to them.  All I have to do is walk across the street.  She’ll be all right.  But he didn’t move.  She stirred feelings inside him like no one ever had.  David didn’t want to let her go.  More than anything he wanted her to live, but he sensed the massive injuries to her body.  She had hit the water like concrete.  Blood seeped from her ears.  No.  The moment he brushed her golden locks from her beautiful, still face, his heart broke.  He cradled her against him like a child.  I can’t let her die. 

*

Need to know what happens next? The Stormy Love Life of Laura Cordelais, Vampires in Manhattan, Book 2 is available on Kindle and Print and Barnes and Noble Print

I’ve given you a lot of details to think about. Have fun!

Truly,

Susan
Susan Hanniford Crowley
https://susanhannifordcrowley.com
https://www.amazon.com/Susan-Hanniford-Crowley/e/B004YXOGXG

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Now we wait
for the return of the princess.