Okay, here’s the thing. I got carried away in my post about the detail hunt. When I started writing it, I just wanted to write about how hard it was to catch details and maybe generate a discussion about where all the good ones were hiding and how other people came up with details.
I didn’t plan on writing about meaning, just about how to end up with a stack of index cards, each one bearing a detail, that I could thumb through when I started writing something new. So you see, I didn’t go into enough detail about the cards. In fact, I’m not even sure I mentioned them.
However, now I want to write about meaning.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines detail as:
1a: “a small or subordinate particular.”
1b: “such a particular, considered (ironically) to be unimportant.”
2a: “small items or particulars (esp. in an artistic work) regarded collectively.”
Details are like thermoses; they work both ways. As in,
That’s just a detail OR it’s all in the details.
So how does something that can be defined as unimportant acquire meaning?
Sue William Silverman wrote in Fearless Confessions:
“Maybe I’d find it easier to write if I were more aware of the meaning in my day-to-day life. But I’m not. Only when I write do I discover what my story means, what my metaphors are. In college, the maroon scarf was only a scarf!”
Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction:
“A detail is concrete if it appeals to one of the five senses; it is significant if it also conveys an idea or a judgment or both…The windowsill was shedding flakes of fungus-green paint is concrete and also conveys the idea that the paint is old and suggests the judgment that the color is ugly.”
What we want is a detail that tells us something, either immediately or later. This is why it’s often referred to as “the telling detail.” A detail is not “just a detail” when it goes to work for you.
On Wednesday I received a critique of a story from one of the people in my writing group. She suggested I delete a line about a coat because “it didn’t add to the story.” I thought, good point. Then I thought, I wonder why I put it in there–twice. With Monday’s post in mind, I thought maybe the solution is not deleting it but making it work for me–making it produce the echo I was writing about when I had intended to write about a stack of index cards.
Do you ever have that thing where for some reason you notice a word and then it’s everywhere? In each of the books you’re reading. Somebody says it on TV. It’s on the first page of The New York Times. The person reading your novel uses it.
