Taking It All In: Details in Writing (& a Prompt)

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Lately, I feel like I’ve blathered on and on about how we incorporate details in our writing:

Enough is enough, right?

Or, is it?

Every time I come across a new article on the way details work in crafting a good story, I learn something new, or I am reminded of a forgotten element of the technique. Either way, how I use details keeps resurfacing in my work and in my discussions about the work, so I’d best keep listening.

In her essay, “Everything Has a Name (Or, How Gardening Made Me a Better Writer),” on Grub Street Daily, Celeste Ng hits on why writers must continue to hone this skill:

[Y]our job, at its heart, is to give everything—objects, events, emotions—its precise name.  Not “flower,” but He was waiting for the geranium.  Not “summer,” but Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects.  Not “beauty,” but this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. . . .To be a writer, you don’t need to have the name of every plant, or every tool, or every bird, at the ready.  But you need to find it, to point your finger and make the reader slow down, pay attention, look closer.

Slow down. Pay attention.

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Your work will translate into a better read for your audience.

The Prompt

Lost or Found. Write about something you lost or something you found.

Consider the specificity of your details. Don’t dress them in adjectives but give them names.

* Photo credit: Microphone, doctor_bob on Morguefile.com; Kids, me.

New is a Relative Term: On Writing Memoir & a Prompt

image: ConceptionSomewhere in the last two weeks (I’ve been on vacation, and I can’t remember who said what when), a friend and I were talking writing and new ideas and wondering, are there really any “new” ideas? Even the story of creation, while it varies among religions, carries the same theme and many of the same elements.

When talking memoir, we all have our stories about when we left home for college or when we first fell in love or the moment we first realized we were “old.”

So, rarely is a story told that is completely new. Still, similar experiences, told to each other or written to share, can be flooded with individuality. Audre Lorde recognized this when she said:

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

We see the world through our eyes only, and the world we view is shaped by interior and exterior forces–by our personalities, sure, but also by the people and places that have taken up station throughout our journey. Christine Hauser highlights this in her post, “Who Are Your People?” on Flash Memoirs:

Your mix of cultures is a powerful factor that shapes the uniqueness of who you are and your one-of-a-kind voice.”

For Hauser, her “cultures” are what others might call “labels.” She lists her cultures as Artist, Writer, IT Worker, Ex-Pat, and American, to name a few. And, she explains that each culture has impacted the person–and the writer–she has become.

I get that.

That’s what makes each of our stories original, even if they aren’t straight, out-of-the-box new ideas.

If you made a list, what would it look like? Would one culture stand out to you more than the others?

The Prompt

DSC04770Who are your people? List them, choose one, and tell us a story.

As a warm up, read Rosalie Sanara Petrouske’s essay, “Nature Lessons,” at Lunchticket (a great literary journal online).

Monthly Writing Prompt: Know When to Break The Rules

IMG_0299 As humans, we are natural storytellers. For me, certain images and smells strike me hard: tapping a memory, pulling me back into time, and demanding that I form those memories into something I can share.

Lisa Cron (WIRED FOR STORY) explains that urge well in this interview on Start Your Novel, “Storytelling is the most powerful tool for change and insight in the world. We’re wired for story. . . . story is what shapes our sense of self, how we see the world, and what actions we therefore take.”

As writers, we work hard to craft our stories into rich pieces of art to which others will relate, or–in the least–enjoy.

We study techniques, memorize rules.

We practice, practice, practice.

We want to get it right.

But, everything in writing is subjective. Even the rules, so necessary in many ways, are questionable. I love this article by Anjali Sachdeva in Creative Nonfiction, where Sachdeva challenges some of the common rules of writing:

Rules. Writing teachers love to sling them around, and writers love to cling to them. Maybe it’s because creative writing is such a slippery and chameleonic undertaking that we’d like to believe there are some dependable guidelines we can trust. But while writing rules can be good starting points for avoiding common mistakes, they all have their exceptions.

[“Show, don’t tell”], without a doubt, [is] the most over-invoked piece of writing advice of all time. . . . In its most basic sense it means “describe and give details, rather than just stating what happened.” . . . Like any writing “rule,” “show, don’t tell” has its exceptions, but the truth is that these exceptions are almost as common as the instances in which a writer should be “showing.”  Most pieces of writing involve constant alternation between summary or exposition and “in-scene” writing (where all that great description, figurative language, and detail comes into play).  When we focus too much on “showing” instead of “telling” we risk overloading our prose with unnecessary descriptors, or devoting excessive page space to something that would be better dealt with in a few sentences of summary.

“Show, don’t tell” strengthens our writing and, when done well, gives our readers an (almost) tangible way to experience the story. However, sometimes this great technique can “overload the prose,” as Sachdeva says, and overwhelm a reader, negating our attempts at successful storytelling.

Max Garland’s essay, “Sin” (also on Creative Nonfiction) certainly packs a small space with powerful images, but there are times throughout where the author turns to telling and pulls the reader along in a way that the images do not:

Once, for instance, I lit a field on fire. It started with a haystack, and I don’t remember from where I stole the matches. I do remember the smell of striking several and watching the straw catch and then putting it out, and then again and again, and although I thought I’d doused the thing, somehow the whole stack went up, and my grandfather was jerking the garden hose toward the field, and I was watching the flames from some shadow somewhere, and simultaneously constructing an alibi, and still watching it burn, beautiful as the lie I was crafting. It was like that.

Take a look at the rest of Anjali Sachdeva’s article and read Garland’s essay in full. Are there times when telling, not showing, will make the difference in your work?

The Prompt

The way my mother told it….

(This prompt comes from Patricia McNair’s Journal Resolution ~ A Daily Prompt project.)