Hello!
How is everyone? Checking in, thinking about writing.
We were talking the other night, in workshop, about how much work specifics do, in terms of building a fictional scene. It’s kind of amazing. Specifics have so much more muscle….
I like to think about cars, as one example, and how people telegraph or hide who they are through their car.
In real life, I don’t care at all what kind of car a person drives or doesn’t drive, but on the page, in fiction, it’s suddenly crucial. I drive an older black Subaru, (my “new” car which is not new at all!) and honestly that’s the standard mom car of Portland. Ha! I drive a car with papers on the car seats, notes to be signed, camping gear and dog treats in the way-back, and sometimes a book, let’s say Kafka’s The Trial, on the dash.
We were talking about the idea of a truck, versus the specifics of a truck.
The next day, walking through the massive parking lot of a local hospital, I noticed all the trucks, which is to say all the people. He parked his truck, he parked his truck, he parked his truck…Who were all of those characters? There were trucks with signs on the side advertising dog training and the power of optimism. There were trucks covered in concrete dust. There was one massive truck, immaculately clean, with a king cab and Oregon Cultural Trust vanity plates that read “GRMLOK”. A quick search on my phone told me that’s a trademarked name for a brand of charcoal bamboo deodorizer. The simple search offered details on who holds the trademark, and where the company is headquartered and more than I needed to know, more than I expected to find. It’s a detail that opened up the world of this person…money, business, charcoal deodorizers, a clean vehicle, a vanity plate, a truck that towers over other cars in the lot…
I was only thinking about trucks, both in general and specifically, and even more, thinking about writing, in general and specifically in reference to work I’d read in workshop, the night before.
If a character parks a truck, a single detail might make that character and truck more three-dimensional, right? But the truck is only an example, one object in a world of objects that reveal character, tell the story of full lives.
These things don’t need to be unpacked over pages, just made real with a bit of this, a bit of that, a fully realized vision. A reminder!
A truck, a smoke, a pair of shoes. How to particularize?
It’s kind of cool to go out in the world and look, and think about the world of your stories, while looking at the world we’ve built, collectively. Keep going!
Love this! Great ideas on how to get closer to the object and description of the object...all in the details!
An excellent post on writing craft and a call to writers that we need to get out of ours heads on a regular basis and look at stuff—not just the beauty of the world but the ordinary and even the homely. This has me thinking of a street corner near us that has become the spot to dump unwanted stuff available for "free." Only once have I been tempted. But an old wooden chair. But I thought, "There's bedbugs in the seams." That chair was gone the next time I passed. I regret my decision.