Detail

An Element of Fiction

Having just covered the element of Selection, it is but natural to next turn to Detail — that which you should, with care, select.

Why?

Because, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe puts it, “God is in the details.”

Which John Gardner seconds, “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.”

He then goes on to elaborate, “The image of Wilson, though not extraordinary, is specific and vivid; we recognize that we’re dealing with a careful author, one worth our trust.

“Rhode’s eye, like any fine novelist’s, is accurate both about literary details (where one’s feet touch on a porch swing) and about metaphorical equivalencies.

“In other words, by selecting the right detail, the writer subtly suggests others; the telling detail tells more than it says.

“The writer who works closely with detail — studying his characters’ most trivial gestures in the imagined scene to discover exactly where the scene must go next — is the writer most likely to persuade and awe us.”

John Steinbeck concurs, “Stay with the detail.

“Slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.

“You must take time in description, detail, detail, looks, clothes, gestures.”

Strunk and White observes, “If in reading Faulkner we have almost the sense of inhabiting Yoknapatawpha County during the decline of the South, it is because the details used are definite, the terms concrete. It is not that every detail is given — that would be impossible, as well as to no purpose — but that all the significant details are given, and with such accuracy and vigor that readers, in imagination, can project themselves into the scene.” [My Italics]

Michelangelo Buonarroti famously said, “Art which is not a trifle, consists of trifles.”

Stephen King observes, “I think you will find that, in most cases, your first visualized details will be the truest and best.”

Othello Bach suggests, “Point out details that will create a ‘word snapshot.’”

Detail-Master Gustave Flaubert says, “When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway, or a concierge smoking his pipe, or a cab-stand, show me that grocer and that concierge, the way they are sitting or standing, their entire physical appearance, making it by the skillfulness of your portrayal embody all their moral nature as well, so that I cannot confuse them with any other grocer or any other concierge. And make me see, by means of a single word, wherein one cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others ahead of it or behind it.”

And more from writer/teacher John Gardner, “Imaginary worlds — huge thoughts made up of concrete detail — so rich and complex, and so awesomely simple, that we are astounded, as we’re always astounded by great art.

“The novel’s unashamed engagement with the world — the myriad details that make character come alive, the sustained fascination with the gossip surrounding the lives of imaginary beings, the naïve emphasis on what happened next and what, precisely, the weather was that day.

“The writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationships, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by that detail within the scene and the story as a whole.

“With rare exceptions the character’s feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events — action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting.”

Flannery O’Connor observes, “The novel works by slower accumulation of detail than the short story does. The short story requires more drastic procedures than the novel because more has to be accomplished in less space. The details have to carry more immediate weight. In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the story itself, and when this happens, they become symbolic in their action.

“If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is essentially the way a story escapes being short.

“I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular.

“I have found that the stories of beginning writers usually bristle with emotion, but whose emotion is often very hard to determine. Dialogue frequently proceeds without the assistance of any characters that you can actually see, and uncontained thought leaks out of every corner of the story. The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and emotions and not in his dramatic action, and that he is too lazy or highfalutin to descend to the concrete where fiction operates. He thinks that judgment exists in one place and sense-impression in another. But for the fiction writer, judgment begins in the details he sees and how he sees them.

“Fiction writers who are not concerned with these concrete details are guilty of what Henry James called ‘weak specification.’ The eye will glide over their words while the attention goes to sleep. Ford Madox Ford taught that you couldn’t have a man appear long enough to sell a newspaper in a story unless you put him there with enough detail to make the reader see him.

“However, to say that fiction proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple, mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you. Art is selective. What is there is essential and creates movement.”

“If you are going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better be real enough that you can smell his breath.” Ford Madox Ford.

And more wisdom from Flaubert, “Observe specific detail and draw for the reader a picture in words of that object or that person … even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin shares, “If my story is set in Chicago in 1995, I can assume that my readers have some general idea of the time and place and how things work there, and can fill in the picture from the barest hints.

“Making the information part of the story is a learnable skill. As always, a good part of the solution consists simply in being aware that there is a problem.”

As for Ayn Rand, “The number of concrete details proper to include in a scene depends on its scale.”

And from John Fowles, “I find films generally fat and flabby, the result of all the details the movie frame has to include which the poem or the novel doesn’t.

“I try to be very careful about fitting details in with the general mood, or certainly in giving things like dress color or speech patterns a symbolic value.”

And from Philip Gerard, “The power of any story lives in its details, the hard accurate image of specific action occurring at a certain precise moment.

“The devil, as usual, is in the details.”

I’ll let John Gardner have the final word on this one, “One can feel sad or happy or bored or cross in a thousand ways: the abstract adjective says almost nothing. The precise gesture nails down the one feeling right for the moment. This is what is meant when writing teachers say that one should ‘show,’ not ‘tell.’ And this, it should be added, is all the writing teacher means. Good writers may ‘tell’ about almost anything in fiction except the character’s feelings. One may tell the reader that the character went to private school (one need not show a scene at the private school if the scene has no importance for the rest of the narrative), or one may tell the reader that the character hates spaghetti; but with rare exceptions the character’s feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events — action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting. Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.”

Amen to that.

© Wolfstuff