First Notice Everything

Each year when I see peonies in bloom, I think of what we used to call Decoration Day. Each Memorial Day, my parents and I drove from one country cemetery to another. We brought coffee cans full of peonies and irises. We filled the coffee cans with gravel. We wrapped them with foil paper. I remember the sweet smells and the rush of air through the open car windows, the spray of gravel from the road under our tires, the freshly mowed cemeteries, some of them on hillsides overlooking fields of timothy grass, others alongside country churches. I recall the way my mother stooped to place the coffee cans along the base of the headstones, the way my father read the names and the dates of birth and death the way he did each year when we came, telling again the stories of grandparents and great-grandparents as far back as John A. Martin, my great-great-grandfather, whose monument was in remarkable condition in the Ridgley Cemetery in Lukin Township. I remember paying respect to our dead with these lovely flowers of spring.

I posted a slightly different version of this paragraph on this blog fourteen years ago. Today, I want to use it to think about one of the basic elements of fiction—concrete details. Any fictional world is made of such things as the scent of peonies, the sound of gravel hitting the undercarriage of a car, the way wind makes waves in a field of timothy grass. Miller Williams, in his poem, “Let Me Tell You,” says this:

 

how to do it from the beginning.

First notice everything:

The stain on the wallpaper

of the vacant house,

the mothball smell of a

Greyhound toilet.

Miss nothing. Memorize it.

You cannot twist the fact you do not know.

 

So it is when it comes to convincing a reader of a piece of fiction that the world inside it actually exists. You’ll never be able to persuade that reader of any nuances of character, any actions of plot, any truths included in the narrative if you don’t first construct a believable world made up of concrete details.

Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners, stresses the importance of utilizing sensory details:

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

She goes on to talk about how writers sometimes are more interested in ideas and abstract thought. They should, instead, she says, direct their attention to “all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” I agree with O’Connor. The writer’s first obligation is to bear witness to the concrete world even if working with science fiction or fantasy. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote. If we can’t tell a reader what people see, hear, smell, taste, feel, we’ll never be able to tell them what goes on inside that character and what it means to our living.

Some beginning writers set their sights on the abstract without letting it come organically from the concrete. O’Connor has this to say about such writers:

The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

We shouldn’t hesitate to get down among the particulars of peonies and hot air through a car window on a gravel road. Such concrete details give rise to everything we have to say about the mysteries of human behavior.

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