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illustration [ LEARNING TO PAY ATTENTION ]

Anyone who spends any time at all at baseball games will immediately understand the phrase “Heads Up!” It is to a baseball fan as instantly recognizable as “Batter up!” and “Two over here, with mustard.”

Heads up means, clearly and succinctly, pay attention. It literally means, at the ballpark, that a baseball is currently in flight and you would be well advised to seek it out, and, if need be, get out of its way, lest it plow into your noggin with the velocity of a missile.

To a writer, heads up should mean something less dangerous, but not less important. As a writer, you have to pay attention, too, constantly, not just when something appears to be coming your way. For a writer, something is always coming your way. You just have to be alert.

To be a good writer, you have to be a persistent and meticulous harvester of detail. To put it less politely, you have to be a thief, pure and outright. Some of your best dialogue will come from people in the line with you at the grocery store or from the teller at the bank or from conversations at other tables that you aren't intended to hear. Then if you're smart, you'll write the details down, preferably in a pocket notebook but saving that, on a napkin or a deposit slip or a business card. You must gather seemingly unimportant minutiae from the world around you and then carefully place them in your writing, like perfect stones in a garden wall.

Morley Callaghan in That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships With Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others remembers the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald came to his flat and was intrigued by freshly washed handkerchiefs spread out on the windowpanes to dry quickly in the sun. Fitzgerald watched Callaghan's wife peel one off and fold it then asked if he could do one. Here's some of what Callaghan recalls about Fitzgerald's reaction:

Did women often do this? he asked. How simple and wonderful it was. Oh, he would certainly use it in a story. Day by day he sought out fresh little details like this one for use in his stories, he said.

Fresh little details. That's what you'd better be on the lookout for. Because all those fresh little details will finally blend together to make your fiction accessible to your reader.

In this chapter, we'll look at ways for you to pay much closer attention to all manners of things out there in your world, in your daily life. So that when you undertake the important business of establishing your setting and describing it, you'll have — if not a veritable cornucopia — at least a wider selection of possibilities than if you hadn't looked around and taken notice in the first place.

Then in the rest of this book we'll use our trinity of approaches (craft, models, and wordsmithing) to find the best ways for you to infuse some of that detail into your setting and your story or novel as a whole.

CREATING A WAREHOUSE OF DETAILS

When you begin to look at everything with a stronger magnification, you'll end up with more bits and pieces of data than you'll ever use. Your journal or file or shoe box or brain (not your best choice here; bits and pieces stay put much better in a shoe box than they will in your brain) will finally become like that crate of old record albums in your closet. You'll never need most of them, but if you should happen to want to listen to a Roger Miller tune that you've taken to humming, you'll know where to look.

This constantly growing collection of observations and discoveries will serve you well. Because the details that will eventually work their way into your setting and description — the characters that will people your story, the words they will say, the clothes they will wear, the rooms where they will wear the clothes — all have their genesis in the world around you, the writer. What you have to do is have your antenna up, and when you find the details, catalog them in some way, tangibly or mentally. Trust me on this: Tangibly is better. Then, you can dip into your warehouse of details whenever you need to and use some of them in your writing.

But what you have to do first is hone your sense of perception and power of observation.

PAYING ATTENTION TO EVERYTHING AROUND YOU

When my wife and I visited Ellis Island one cold January day, we had lunch in the snack bar. The snack bar offered typical snack bar fare, and we settled down to our burgers and fries and steaming coffee in a high-ceilinged, drafty big room that might have once been a holding area or examination room back when shiploads of immigrants still docked outside. I looked around — I cased the joint, to use a crime writer's idiom — and made little mental notes of my surroundings. About the texture of the walls. The exposed pipes that gurgled and groaned. The frosty condensation on the windows. These are the kinds of details that you should always be on the lookout for as a writer, just in case you might be able to work some of them into your writing.

Then I noticed an older couple sitting at the table nearest us. I had seen them on the boat ride over, standing close together at the rail, their overcoat collars pulled up high at their necks. Now they were still in their coats but had taken off their gloves and mufflers. The small man said a few words to his small wife in a distinctly British accent. High British, not Cockney. The Queen's English. Hugh Grant English. They fidgeted with the little packets of salt and pepper; they smiled at them. Then they carefully unwrapped their packets of plastic cutlery and began to eat their hamburgers and fries with knives and forks, the forks never leaving their left hands, the knives never leaving their right.

My attention was entirely on them now. I lifted out my pocket notebook and scribbled a few words about the man's pencil thin mustache, their white hair, the way they sat up straight at the table, like our mothers used to tell us to do. I noted the way they both lifted up the tops of their burgers with their plastic knives to peek at what exactly it was they were eating.

My wife and I have promised ourselves another trip to Ellis Island. Her because she had so looked forward to it. She's a third grade teacher and does an immigration unit, but she took too strong a motion sickness pill prior to riding the boat and was doped up for the whole experience. And I want to go back because my attention was riveted the entire time on that little couple from England, on their mannerisms and their dialect, on their reactions to the exhibits. On the way they held on to each other when they stepped back on the boat at the end, so neither of them would stumble.

Now, let's put you in this scenario. You're out there on Ellis Island instead of me, and your writer's radar has locked unto this couple. How do you go about the task of gathering some useful information that you might actually end up using?

First, I'd advise against following around behind them with your pocket notebook open and your pen scratching like that of a cub reporter in an old movie. But you do need to pay careful and close attention. To you, that little couple has to become possibilities. Think about who they might be in a story. You might imagine them as high society, having asked the concierge at the Plaza to book them an outing at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. They'd had all their New York meals in fancy restaurants, at Tavern on the Green and the Four Seasons. Out on the island and feeling a mite peckish, their only option was the strange snack bar cuisine and plastic utensils. So, not used to eating with their hands, they made the best of it.

Then mystery and irony may lift their sinister heads. Now you might see them as a couple of spies blending in quietly on a tourist outing. The crisp, British accent has been polished to perfection, the ritual with the knives and forks worked out nicely. Or maybe he's on the lam — has been since the sixties — living on the money he embezzled in Geneva.

Then, in a softer mood, they may become a retired tailor and his wife of fifty years from Liverpool, on the vacation they've been saving for since they started watching American shows on the telly. Maybe one of them is sick, and this trip is the big splash before the darkness, before the other one is left alone in the small house on a narrow street where they've lived since Queen Elizabeth was a young girl.

If you end up using this pair in your fiction, you're going to have to eventually describe them so well that your readers will see and hear them as surely as if they were watching them in a movie. If your story takes place at Ellis Island, you'll have to do the same thing with the setting. So, here they are, the couple in the flesh and the place spread out around you laden with details. If you intend to ever use them, what you need to do is come away from that outing with a notebook full of snippets that should soon become more legible entries in your journal. Then, who knows? They might just become a story that college freshmen will grapple with a century from now.

Or — more likely — some of the snippets will work their way into several pieces of your writing, into several of your characters. This encounter needn't have only character possibilities; you might end up using some of these details to describe how an entirely different elderly couple interacts or how foreigners behave in unfamiliar territory.

Now, here's the point. In order to come up with something that you can use in your writing, you have to glean many, many details, most of which you will probably end up not using at all. You have to know how these people stood and walked and sat and waited in line. You have to know how they moved their hands around when they talked to each other or how they kept their hands perfectly still. Beyond the people themselves, you need to know what the place looked like, what it smelled and sounded like, and even what it felt like.

In short, you have to have a complete sense of it, whether you use the details in a story about that particular time and place or completely different ones — down to seemingly unimportant details — if you stand any chance at all of taking your readers there.

SCAVENGING FOR DETAILS

The best way to become more proficient at anything is to practice; just ask any athletic coach or piano teacher. And that certainly holds true for writers. The more times you revise something, the better it's likely to get; the longer you write fiction, the better you're likely to get. And the more time you spend searching for details, the more interesting and useful details you're likely to come up with.

There will be some specific practice exercises at the end of the chapter. But for now let's look at a couple of ways to get better at paying attention to details.

Focus on the Past

Pick a time and a place in your past that you remember reasonably well. You shouldn't pick an episode when you were an infant or a very small child, since you'll be fabricating almost everything. Fabrication is fine and proper for a writer, but the purpose of these practice field trips is to hone your powers of perception, not your imagination. Neither should you to pick a monumental or life-changing event, like the day your father died or the day you became engaged or became a parent for the first time. The enormity of such an experience will tend to overshadow what you're trying to do, which is mine for particulars.

Here are two more rules for these practices: The time has to be more than ten years ago (readers less than sixteen years of age may modify that to five), and the place has to be one that you haven't seen for quite a while. That's important; this won't be a helpful practice if you had the experience recently or if you see the place often. Your grandmother's kitchen might work, when you were, say, ten or eleven, or a girlfriend's or boyfriend's living room when you were in high school. Maybe a place where you went on a family vacation many years ago would be a good choice.

Once you've settled on the time and a place, make plenty of notes. Don't worry about sentence structure at this point; in fact, don't worry about writing sentences at all. A list might work better for you, or some sort of diagram. Get down everything that comes to your mind about both the time and the place: what the weather was like on that day, who else was there, what the landscape was like — if you were outside — and what kind of furniture there was — if you were inside.

Then move on to the nitty and the gritty: the sensory details. What did the furniture feel like? Exactly what color was the sky? Just blue won't do. Maybe a metaphor will work better for you, or a simile. Maybe just a darned good adjective will suffice. Adjectives are one of the real workhorses of good writing, the salt and pepper that perk things up, but sometimes carefully chosen nouns and verbs can eliminate the need for them. When you're practicing, just spill out a bunch of words and phrases that capture the place and time you are remembering for you. When you're done, write a rough draft that will capture the moment for your reader.

These needn't be lengthy sagas. Something around one typed, double-spaced page ought to do it, or two or three pages in the journal that I'm going to strongly suggest, a few pages from now, that you never let get very far from you. And these shouldn't be stories with conflicts and rising action and suspense and resolution and all of that business. Trying to write a story will just defeat your purpose. Just compose a clear first draft describing that time and place. Be a wordsmith. Choose each and every word carefully so that the finished product will actually take your reader there. It's a good idea to start doing some of that wordsmithing in your notes; that way, a little of your most important work is done before you even get to the writing. When something that smells good pops up on your list, you might go ahead and write down aroma and drifts, since these are better words than smell and approaches. Or when you first imagine clouds in a light blue sky, you might write stringy wisps in a robin's egg sky, since this is an image you might end up using.

Each time you start one of these practices you must remember an essential step: As you make your notes, think of that time and that place in present tense, not past. The events of that day should be happening right now. In our pigeonhole brains, past tense means over and done with. It means been there, done that. Present tense means something is playing out as we watch it. Even when you write a story in past tense, the events still have to play out as the reader watches them. So you had best do all of your imagining in present tense if you intend your story to come to life for your reader.

Try this and see what you come up with. I think you'll be surprised at the details you'll unearth that have been buried for a long time. By practicing this over and over, you'll become accustomed to spotting — and creating — the small, often unnoticed fine points that will craft rich descriptions and settings in your stories and novels.

Focus on the Present

Another way to practice allows you to give your memory a rest. Settle comfortably into a fairly interesting place that is quite real and in the here and now. It should be an active place where something is happening — preferably where people are coming and going — so that you can describe them. Notice how they're dressed, the pitch of their voices, their mannerisms. Pick a place where you don't know the people, so that your descriptions won't be based on preconceived notions but on what you actually see and hear.

Plop yourself down with pad and paper on a bench in a busy park or in a shopping mall. Maybe you're waiting for your flight to be called at the airport and you need something to do anyway; airports and bus and train stations are wonderful arenas for people watching. Try a coffee shop, a museum, or outside your office building at lunch hour. The possibilities are endless.

As with the practice from memory, pay close attention to the physical surroundings, to smells and textures and sounds. Look for little things that you might very well have missed if you weren't tightening your focus. See how perceptive you can be when you don't have to remember a thing, when all you have to do is pay close attention.

When practicing in the present, your subject is hustling and bustling all around you — not in the foggy recesses of your brain — so you might dispense with taking notes and just write. Freewriting is useful for practicing your thinking and your writing. With freewriting, you don't worry about syntax or spelling or maybe even punctuation. You just spill out ideas as they come to you and images as you see them.

But as you freewrite, again practice wordsmithing, choosing just the right words and phrases. Once you've come up with a paragraph or two, look back over it and circle words that might have better possibilities. For instance, if somebody you are watching is walking, consider the kind of walking they are doing. Walking is generic and dull. It hardly ever tells your reader enough. Watch your subject closer and determine just exactly what sort of walking she is up to. Is she ambling? Strutting? Meandering? Strolling? Promenading? Is she traipsing or tiptoeing or tromping or bounding? Something that makes a person unique can very often be conveyed in one word. But it has to be just the right word. So choose carefully.

When you're choosing, be careful with the thesaurus. It's an extremely useful tool when used correctly, as simply a list of possible replacements, but very few words are exactly interchangeable. Look back at all those walking words; each one means a distinctly different action. Each one carries with it a reflection of the walker's attitude. So you can't very well slap one in place of any other one and expect to come up with the precise image you want to convey.

As an example, let's say you settle into a comfortable chair in a large bookstore a few days before Christmas. What you come up with might start something like this:

The Christmasy sweater on the plump fellow in the chair across the table from me has seen more than a season or two. Its turtle neck has drooped a bit; the holly and berries are less vibrant than they must once have been, the white background more a dull gray now. Still, 'tis the season, and this guy's sweater is more of a celebration of it than I am currently providing. He's flipping through a computer manual that is thicker than a Bible. But he's not really looking at it. He stares at his watch every minute or two. Waiting for his wife to finish her shopping, I'll wager.

Two old friends run into each other in the aisle between Christian Inspiration and Poetry. They are in late middle age and are either pleasantly surprised or act sufficiently so. One of them has a granddaughter of seven or so with him. She is restless and wants the little reunion to adjourn. She begins to kick one small foot back and forth and then the other. Now the kicking becomes a rhythmic enterprise, the upper half of her body not moving at all. She's taken clog dancing, this one.

Now, what can you make out of this hodgepodge, or any hodgepodge that you put together? Probably nothing. Remember, you're doing these exercises simply as practice, to hone your powers of observation and your wordsmithing.

Look at a few of the details and word choices. Christmasy is more unique than festive or holiday when referring to the man's sweater. Thicker than a Bible offers a more concrete visual image than just thick.

A freewriting exercise like this — in addition to giving you practice at locating and polishing details — might also provide you with some story ideas. Even the beginning of this one has possibilities. Maybe the two old friends bumping into each other is the starting point for an interesting backstory that involves both of them and the woman that they both loved long ago. Maybe the clogging girl standing anxiously by is the granddaughter of that long ago love. Maybe, in fact, she is the spitting image of the man who just ran into her grandfather.

For a writer, the world is made up of maybes. And they're all in the details. What you as a writer have to do — all the time — is pay attention to the grand parade that is constantly passing in front of you.

TAKING NOTES

Now that we've established the importance of digging up details, let's look at some useful ways to remember them.

The best chance I have of remembering anything is writing it down. Whether it's groceries that need to be bought, dry cleaning that needs to be picked up, a phone call that needs to be made, or whatever, if it's going to get done by me it needs to be on paper.

Note taking — the filtering down of lots of stuff to not very little, the focusing on the most important components — is a skill that too many high school students get to college without knowing how to do. Their freshman fall semester grades are often evidence of this.

For you as a writer, note taking is as essential as it is for those college freshmen. Being a keen observer of human nature and architecture and cloud formations and everything else that constitutes the big, wide world that is your database is one thing. But remembering any of it is quite another.

I see more and more people poking away at their Palm Pilots with little probes, and that might work just fine. Except that I don't have a Palm Pilot. What I do have is smaller, considerably less expensive, and — from the looks on the faces of those Palm Pilot pokers — less aggravating. Of course, you should use whatever works best for you.

A TRUSTY NOTEBOOK, CLOSE AT HAND

I suggest you keep a pad or a small notebook in your pocket or purse. Keep another one in the glove compartment of your car and one more in your desk at work.

Who knows when you'll hear a nice bit of dialogue that is worth remembering or see a particularly pretty sunset whose mixture of colors needs to be recorded? You'll most probably never again see that odd pair of children skipping stones across a lake — better get down the details while you have them.

Don't think that you have to be only on the lookout for unusual or ironic things, like the couple eating their burgers and fries with knives and forks on Ellis Island. You should be looking for ordinary things, as well. Remember, everyday life is made up mostly of ordinary things. And if your fiction is to be reflective of everyday life, it had better contain plenty of the same.

If you're afraid that that will make for boring fiction, I suggest you read John Updike's classic story titled “A&P.” It's set in a suburban supermarket, and the central character — a high school grocery checker — and his daily surroundings are as ordinary as things can get. “A&P” is anthologized in hundreds of collections. It's taught in high schools and colleges. It will outlive Updike by many hundreds of years. I don't know about you, but I'll take the risk of dealing with ordinary things if any of that is even a remote possibility.

Plenty of words and snippets about commonplace things and people find their way into my pocket notebook. Then the little torn-out pages collect on my desk like autumn leaves, until I think better of their usefulness and throw them away or transcribe them into my journal or work them directly into a manuscript.

The leaves should start piling up on your desk, too. They might be the sparks that get your writing started and the twigs that keep it burning. Your fiction will be made up of ideas and details, and it's more than just a clever plan to jot them down as you find them. It's absolutely essential to your craft.

In addition to scraps of dialogue that either get spoken by real people or that you (or your characters) dream up, and notations of details that you notice all over the place, the following are a few things that might end up in your notebook.

Maps, Floor Plans, Schematics

When I decided to write my first book — a memoir about growing up in a small East Texas town — I needed a more exact perception of that town than the almost thirty years separating it and me left intact. I remembered my parents well enough, and my sisters; our house was sufficiently clear. And I had photographs and some old letters and school yearbooks to help me. But what I didn't have was a focused, visual layout of the town itself, in 1962. What I needed was a map. What I needed was Jonnie Hodges.

Jonnie and I have known each other all our lives. And one of the things that I've known best about him is that he has one heck of a memory. I hadn't seen or heard from him in a long time, but I was betting that he still had it.

He did. I gave him a call, visited a few minutes, learned that Jonnie had become Jon about the same time that, in my case, Ronnie had become Ron, then told him my predicament. Several days later, a large brown envelope showed up in my mailbox; folded into it was a big piece of butcher paper, maybe two and a half feet by four. And on that paper, in careful pencil markings, was my old hometown. To say it was detailed would be an understatement. It was as much a bird's eye view as it was a map, and it even had trees — duly noted as “pecan” or “elm” or “hard to climb” — in the correct locations in yards. Jonnie had penciled in little notes and arrows, like this one that hovers over the corner of the sidewalk at Bobby Stroud's hardware store: “Narrow here. Hard to turn on a bike.”

That map became one of my most valuable sources for Into That Good Night. It provided me with detail after detail that I would have never been able to remember for myself. So I was smart, I think — and certainly fortunate — to tap a resource in the person of an old friend that could remember things better.

When you're concocting your setting, be it real or imagined, it might prove useful to come up with a map of your own — or maybe a floor plan — showing how furniture is arranged in a room. If an important scene (and if you're going to be any good at this, all of your scenes will be important) is to be played out in a park, or on a city street, draw a schematic of where things are — of where your characters will be standing or sitting or running or dying.

The guy in Sheboygan might not want to know where absolutely everything is located. Let's face it, often he doesn't need to know. But you do, if you're going to write the scene well.

We'll be spending lots of time later on how you can best describe settings that are real and settings that are not. But here's the deal: They all have to be real for you.

Details From Movies, Television, and Radio

The world around you is filled to brimming with images and details and people that you can draw from as a writer. Now let's get a little more specific and look at three resources for your note taking that you probably spend a lot of your time with anyway.

When I wrote The Windows of Heaven, a novel that is set in Galveston in 1900, I must have watched the videotapes of two old movies, O. Henry's Full House and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, at least a dozen times each. They are both set in the same era as my story and both have similar specific settings, like city streets and restaurants and front rooms and butcher shops. Obviously, careful attention was paid in the production of each film to the accuracy of historical detail. And that was precisely what I needed. I needed to see somebody sit down in a fancy eatery in 1900 and order a meal. I needed to hear horses clip-clopping on brick streets and delivery wagons clanking along behind them and organ grinders on the sidewalk. Much of the description of the setting in my novel came directly from those two movies, and others.

When you write your story or novel, don't overlook this readily available store of information. Watch a movie or television program that might be helpful to you with a pencil and pad in hand. You'll be surprised at how many nuggets of details you'll come up with that will find their way into your settings and descriptions.

One more thing: DVD copies of movies often provide an “added features” selection on their menus. These are usually directors and/or screenwriters sharing why they chose to keep or delete or lengthen or shorten entire scenes in the film. They offer a unique insight into the way the story has been developed, and it will almost certainly be useful to you as a writer, because you'll be constantly making exactly the same sorts of decisions in your work. These artists' philosophies regarding the way they told their stories might very well influence how you will tell yours.

Most of your readers grew up watching television, and almost all of them watch it on a regular basis. Much of what they know about how stories work is from the programs they see on the tube, so — since you intend to tell them a story — you'd better log a little time watching also. That's certainly not to suggest that you should pattern all that you write on television scripts, but here's an advantage to doing so at least some of the time. Scripts written for television — especially those of the half-hour situation comedy variety — have to conform to very precise time limitations, so they must be free of everything that doesn't have to be there. And guess what: so should your fiction. A careful analysis of how a writer introduces situations, moves conflicts along, and then resolves them in short order will benefit you greatly when you have to do the same thing in your writing.

Now, let's move to the radio. Listen to National Public Radio (NPR) in your car, and in their wonderful interviews with writers and newsmakers and movers and shakers in society, you'll hear uniquely turned phrases and clever manipulation of syntax that you should try to remember to jot down when you get where you're going. NPR also broadcasts lots of writers reading their essays or portions of their stories, novels, and poems. We can learn more about the economy of language, the untainted essence of wordsmithing, from good poems than from just about any other place. Hearing the poet read her words — emphasizing what she wants emphasized, whispering what she wants whispered — is pure magic to a writer and can be enormously useful to you when you sit down to write words of your own.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a program on NPR, is a daily essay read by its author, Dr. John H. Lienhard, a retired professor of engineering at the University of Houston. I've listened to hundreds of them, all finely written little stories about how human beings down the centuries have made things work or have made them work better. The stories are always interesting and enjoyable, but their greatest value to me has been the crafting of them by Dr. Lienhard. I hear the program on the way to work each morning, and many days the first thing I do when I get to my desk is download and print out the text of that day's essay. Then I read it over and marvel at its wordsmithing. I owe Dr. Lienhard a debt of gratitude as a writer; his fine phrasing and sense of drama have been particularly beneficial to me as a writer. Listen in sometime — or find another good essay program — and see if this method helps your writing, too.

Noting Other Wordsmiths

An important component of our three-way approach to description and setting — our trinity that we will use in every chapter after this one — is modeling. That means careful examination of how published writers work their magic. Most of our models will come from novels and short stories, but don't overlook the many talented, skillful writers that appear in magazines and newspapers.

I have favorites among columnists, who I look forward to reading. Each has his or her own individual style that, more than likely, has affected my style, my voice. I enjoy crusty conservatives like Bill O'Riley and fiery liberals like Molly Ivans equally well, since the one thing that they do have in common is that they are both skilled manipulators of the written word. And what wordsmith worth his stripes hasn't marveled at the pieces by William Safire — the syndicated king of all wordsmiths — who provides interesting and useful insight into the origins and history and changing meanings of words and phrases.

When I wrote a novel set in northern Ohio where I've never been, I needed help regarding topography and climate and trees and such things. A friend who lives in Cleveland proved useful, as did a couple of reference books and the Internet. As odd as it might sound, my clearest, strongest sense of the place came from a pair of small spaces I've visited daily for years: Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft. They're both comic strips set in — you guessed it — northern Ohio.

All of these — movies, television, radio, columnists, even the comics — offer visual and mental images and unique phrasings that transport you somewhere else. Pay close attention to them, so that you can do the very same thing for your reader.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

Remember the small irony of the British couple I watched eating their hamburgers with knives and forks? Very likely, I would never have dreamed that up on my own. But once I saw it, I remembered it. It was a nice, little surprise on a cold winter's day.

One of your best tools in your writing will be the use of irony, and sometimes it comes in small doses, in details. So be on the lookout for surprises; readers like to be surprised. Everybody likes a bit of irony worked in, if not in his or her own lives then certainly in fiction. The fact is that we get plenty of irony in reality — things that don't work that should, people who let us down, situations that turn out all wrong or, happily, right for once — so we expect it to be there in stories and novels.

Look a little closer at things, people, and places to spot anything that might be amiss. Like ivy that has woven its way through the framework and wheel sprockets of a bicycle that has been left much too long beside a flowerbed. Or the Baltimore Colts coffee mug that is never very far away from the security man in your office building, even though Baltimore hasn't had a team called the Colts in years. What a fine little telling detail that would be to help establish one of your characters, whose loyalty to a team has outlived the team itself.

Be on the lookout for surprises.

KEEPING A WRITER'S JOURNAL AND/OR A DIARY

You've been expecting this, I suspect, since I've mentioned it more than once.

In my creative writing classes, I require my students to keep a writers' journal, a binder of blank pages on which I want them to record — on a daily basis — reactions to how stories work (or don't) in books and movies. I want them to make notes about things they see or hear or taste or smell or touch, unusual word combinations, ideas for stories or poems. And I encourage them to scribble down pieces of scenes from whatever they are currently writing.

We're not talking about a diary here. A writer's journal shouldn't be made up of secrets. Neither should it be rantings about how you've been mistreated. We all get mistreated from time to time, and if you intend to wade into the publishing world one day, you'll get mistreated again. Fret over it quietly, or howl at the moon, but keep it out of your writer's journal. It should be reserved for the notes and sketches and observations of someone who is serious about the business of writing. It's a fine place to embellish those maps and floor plans that you scribbled into your notebook and to record treasures you pick up in columns and interviews.

What if one of your characters in your story starts talking in your head? They do that, you know. Well, you'd best write that down. Because you won't remember it long, and they more than likely won't say it again.

I use a loose-leaf binder for my journal, so that I can insert tabs in an attempt at categorizing the contents. I can toss what proves on second thought to be chaff while keeping the wheat. But use whatever format works best for you. Try a few different ways until you find the right fit.

Journaling is an essential component in writing fiction. And, if I could believe that you will actually do at least some of the things that I suggest, I hope that keeping a writer's journal will be one of them.

My new students balk at the prospect. Many of them are veterans of teacher-imposed journaling. But once they see how their journals can benefit them as writers, most of my students come onboard as believers, and I hope you will too. Here's proof that journaling is effective: When I announce to my classes that they aren't responsible for journal pages over the Christmas break, my really dedicated writers do it anyway. In fact, they almost always have many more pages filled in their journals on due dates than I assigned. That's because, early on, they stopped writing the entries for me and started doing it for themselves. More specifically, they started doing it for their fiction.

Any writing that you do helps you to become a better writer. Writing is like that, like playing the piano and driving a car and tap dancing. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

When you set aside enough time to write a page or two — or more — in your journal every day, you'll be surprised at how much of that seemingly unimportant stuff works its way into your fiction. And at how much better you become at hooking words to each other to convey images, which is wordsmithing at its most fundamental level.

Some Things to Keep in a Writer's Journal

Now this, please, about diaries: Even though I may never be able to convince some of my students to maintain one, they may wish they had. A well-kept diary is a lucrative source for all manner of practical information concerning exactly when the diarist was at a particular place or event, whom she was there with, and what was done there.

My diary, rather than my journal, is where I can vent on occasion about mistreatment. It's where I jot down a little summary of each day's proceedings, oftentimes nothing more elaborate than “Rained in the morning. Graded short stories. Meat loaf for supper.” Other times they run to a page or two. Nothing, I assure you, that will keep a reader on the edge of their seat a century from now.

When I wrote that memoir about growing up in the little East Texas town, every other chapter was the story of my father's Alzheimer's experience, his stroke, and, finally, his death. My diary became an essential tool when it came to logistics, to specific dates and the general progression of his illness. It was also very useful in helping me recall my own feelings about Alzheimer's. And revisiting those emotions in the pages of my diary have helped me to develop characters in my fiction that are going through similar circumstances. A day's events could wind up as the basis for a scene in one of your stories, or even as the major plot line.

You might be wondering why a journal and a diary can't be kept as one volume. Many people do it that way. I use them as two very different tools and have determined that for me they work better as separate units. Each succeeding volume of the diary I keep ends up on the closet shelf. The journal dies in stages. Those things that I will only need for a particular story or novel get tossed when the work is done. But some of the other things that didn't get used this time around I hold on to. They may be used later, or maybe not. But — like that crate of old record albums — I know where to find them if I need them.

SUMMARY: THE LITTLE WORLD IN THE WRITER'S MIND

Wherever you go searching for the details that might be helpful to you, wherever you locate them, and however you choose to preserve them, remember this: Your job as a writer is to ultimately weave some of them into a piece of writing that will lift your readers up and situate them in a place and a time of your choosing.

In this chapter, we've looked at the importance of paying close attention to details — in your writing and in the world around you — and ways to hang onto them. Look for ideas and particulars everywhere, in places that you see every day and places that you've never seen before, in movies and television and radio programs, in conversations among people around you, in the published work of good writers, even in the most unlikely places, like comic strips. And don't forget to look in one of your best resources: your own memory of times and things past. Then get those things down, first on anything close at hand — like a pocket notebook — and later in a writer's journal or a diary.

Once you've sharpened your observation skills and taken notes about what you've seen, you're ready to get down to the matter of telling this story you want to tell. And the first order of business is to create the little world in your own mind in which that story will take place. Because if it doesn't exist there, it won't stand a chance of existing in your reader's mind. Two of the most essential elements of that world — of your access and eventually your reader's access to it — are your treatment of setting and use of description.

EXERCISE 1

Think of five places you have visited for which you had a preconceived notion or expectation before arriving. Think harder, now, and recall something in each place that blew that preconception away. Write down your preconception and the detail that shattered it for each.

EXERCISE 2

Try this: In that pocket notebook you're going to start carrying around, make it a point to jot down at least one thing that you wouldn't have expected to be where it is, or there at all, in several places that you go every day, or every week. Check out the lawns in your neighborhood on your way to work or to the market.

At least one of them will hold a surprise that you've overlooked, because you haven't been looking closely. Now you are.

Here are a few categories of things to look for to start you on your quest:

EXERCISE 3

We've spent most of this chapter talking about how to look for details in the world around you. Sometimes the best place to look is at the holes in your existing drafts that are begging for more elaboration.

Sit yourself down with a printed copy of several pages of your manuscript and a pencil. Read over your work, paying particular attention to your inclusion of details in your setting and overall description, or — as might be the case — to your absence of details. Draw circles or arrows or frowning faces. Use whatever code that best suits you, but find places that would benefit from better details and better description.

EXERCISE 4

Perhaps the best way to practice paying better attention is to do the two things we discussed earlier in this chapter:

• Close your eyes and remember a place that you haven't seen in a long time and get down as many specific details as you can.

• With pen and paper in hand, closely observe what is going on around you in an active place.

In both exercises, make sure you find things you wouldn't normally pay close attention to. Write rough copies full of the things you found, practicing wordsmithing as you write.