The Sue Grafton Project: D is for Details
Our writing lives or dies by its details. Too many and your reader yawns, skips a few pages, or puts your book down. Too few and she can’t conjure a picture in her head. As with so many other aspects of writing, Sue Grafton’s a master of the telling detail, providing just enough for readers to imagine the rest.
Take this description of a small-town café in G is for Gumshoe: “The lights in the café were just blinking on, vibrant green neon spelling out the word CAFÉ in one convoluted loop, like a squeeze of tooth gel. I could see a waitress in a pale pink uniform scratch her backside at the height of a yawn. The highway was empty and I crossed at a casual pace.”
Notice how we’re in motion with the point-of-view character here, walking across the highway toward the café. The time of day is clearly just before dawn (the reader already knows this, but the chosen details here add to the effect). Now count how many details there are: (1) the lights; (2) the waitress’s uniform, (3) scratch, and (4) yawn; and (5) the empty highway. Five simple details, from which each of us has, with Kinsey Millhone, crossed a pre-dawn highway toward a very specific café.
Here’s a very different example, from K is for Killer (Beauty is a dog; Kinsey’s entering a radio station at night, where Hector, a DJ, is working): “At the station, I let myself in. Hector had left the door ajar, and the foyer lights on. I went down into the twilight of the stairwell with my paper packet of bones. Beauty was waiting for me when I reached the bottom. She was the size of a small bear, her dark eyes bright with intelligence. Her coat was red gold, the undercoat puffy and soft. When she saw me, her fur seemed to undulate and she emitted a low, humming growl. I watched her lift her head at the scent of me. Without warning she pursed her lips and howled, a soaring note of ululation that seemed to go on for minutes. I didn’t move, but I could feel my own fur bristle in response to her keening. I was rooted to the bottom step, my hand on the rail.”
Unlike Grafton’s Kinsey, I’m not afraid of dogs, but this scene makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, just as it does Kinsey’s. Not only is the reader frozen on that stairway with Kinsey, word-wise, Grafton spends a lot of time on specific details here—because one detail in particular turns out to be important.
Mystery writers plant plenty of red herrings, spending the same amount of time on details that won’t pan out as those that will. But whenever those details elicit a reader’s shiver, as those above do, pay attention, not only for the sake of your read but because, if you’re a writer, you’ll want to strive to do the same thing.
By the way, if you’re wondering how I pick citations for this blog, it’s entirely unscientific. I grab a few books from the long row in the guestroom bookcase, then, one at a time, flip through pages until a passage leaps out at me. It’s always the right one, but that’s because Grafton has so many to choose from.
The third week of next month, the Sue Grafton Project will look at E, which in my book (or rather, my blog) is for Enemies. I hope you’ll join me.
