Last weekend, as I sat around the table and listened to stories written by my friends at the Retirement Center, we discussed the the power of details. Almost everyone wrote on last month’s prompt, “I look like _____,” and we marveled at how each person approached the exercise differently.
One person wrote about life with his identical twin. Another person told of his wife, how she often made him look good and never took the credit. One man wrote on himself, starting his essay with a punch, “I look like something the cat dragged in.” Then, he took the reader on an introspective journey from that image of what he sees on the outside to what he remembers on the inside: children and grandchildren, success and happiness and, despite one day’s sad musings, memories of a long life gone well.
Though all the essays differed, we witnessed one thing in common, how certain details in images can add texture and richness to a story.
Details reveal more than the setting.
Every month these folks bring tiny memoir pieces to the table, flash nonfiction, so this month I shared with them an essay by Brenda Miller in the ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION. In “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” Miller talks, about the importance of images and detail when crafting a story in such a short space on paper. She writes about her experience, of how one simple image—a piece of wood in the road—led to the unfolding of her own short memoir essay:
The essay came out of me in one piece, in about 30 minutes, one image leading to the next. The first words, I’m sorry…led me along, and become the mantra for the rest of the piece, I’m sorry, I said, and I said it again, and we continued on our way through the desert, in the dark of night…. Flash images arise…I let them come, I don’t censor them, because by now the essay has taken on a life of its own. And since I know this will be a very short piece, I won’t have to inhabit this space very long—in and out, touching the wounded spot and letting it go.
Later, she says of these kinds of pieces:
Because flash nonfiction is so short, I needed to take only a slice of that time, and from this one cross-section…I could unravel the rest. [Flash nonfiction] requires the same attention to language as one would give to a poem: each line needs to carry some weight, and to gradually evolve into more meaning as it goes along.
Then, I read a few paragraphs to those writers at the table from an essay by Barbara Hurd in her book, WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS:
A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re a riot of spires and pinpricks, ribbed turbans and knobby cones. Ivory, copper, pinkish, twisted, scalloped, hinged.
. . . .
When I open my eyes, the ocean seems to demand too much. At another time in my life, I might have responded — raised a sail, plied my oars, at least considered the lure of infinity. If the sea, after all, has any constant call that can also sound like taunting, it goes like this: come in, come in. But this is the cold North Atlantic and I’m older and I won’t and besides, if I did, I’d be out there immersed in the lives of these cracked-open things I’d rather look at underfoot. It’s not that I’m tired of desire; I just want to make sure it’s my own.
In Barbara Hurd’s essay, certain details are missing. We don’t know when the storm started, when it stopped, how long it lasted. But with the images Hurd leaves behind, and in each description, she reveals more into her own state of being. And, that’s what makes this piece so powerful.
As Lisa Cron says in her book on writing, “the story is in the specifics.”
This month’s prompt.
After the storm.
Read more from Brenda Miller in “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION and from Barbara Hurd in “Wordwrack: Openings,” in WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS.
* Photo credits: kakisky and greenfinger on Morguefile.com