CHAPTER 19

KILLER-DILLER DETAILS BRING FICTION TO LIFE

BY DONNA LEVIN

There’s an expression, “God is in the details,” and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?

Well, not exactly, but fiction writing and lying do have something in common. (Picasso said, “Art is a lie that lets us see the truth.”) In both cases you are making something up and trying to make someone believe it. Even when you write about something that “really happened” in your personal life, in fiction you will find that making the reader believe it is one of your chief tasks.

Now, I mean “believe” in a specialized sense. A reader picks up a book in a store knowing it’s fiction, or fictionalized. But when the reader actually buys the book, he’s in effect saying to the author, “I’m going to give you a chance to tell me a story that I can at least pretend is real for the duration of the book.” Providing the details is how you make your reader into a believer. It’s how you put your reader into the action.

As a writer, you should know that if you really want the reader to believe he’s reading about an African safari, you’d better describe the long purple tongues of the giraffes. You must learn that giraffes have purple tongues, or imagine they do, or remember that detail from your real-life safari or trip to the zoo. The purple tongue of the giraffe lets us see the giraffe.

A detail doesn’t need to be real in the conventional sense in order to have power. Science fiction and horror writers know very well the power of invented, but authentic, details.

One of the most compelling aspects of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is that Rice really makes you believe that vampires exist, and she does so by the exquisite detailing of the way they live (or, we might say, unlive) and function. She casually dismisses any familiar Hollywood notions or even any traditional ones that don’t suit her. “Forget that,” she says, “this is the way it is.” And then she follows her own rules with a steely consistency.

In the same way, the science fiction writer has to let us know that the South Forkorian qebor eats yodels and that yodels eat mordons in order to establish the food chain on the planet Zen.

When writing historical fiction, you must weave in as many of the factual details as you can. But sometimes you will be called upon to fill gaps that history has left. Your inventions—whether they are to surmise the way that the Huns celebrated wedding ceremonies or to recreate dialogue spoken by Charlemagne—will also make history seem real.

QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY

When it comes to details, more is not necessarily better. The number of details you need to describe a person or to dramatize an event is a result of several factors. The first is your writing style. Some writers like to give the reader just enough of the bare facts to keep from getting lost. Others like to write lavish descriptions of every crinoline.

Both the amount and type of details you include will also be a function of the genre you’re writing in. The readers of a Judith Krantz-style “sex and shopping” novel will be looking for lots of brand names, especially of designer clothes. A sword-and-sorcery novel will require you to authenticate the magic by inventing the details of how it works. A police procedural requires the details of how evidence is collected, suspects interviewed, and bodies autopsied.

Another factor in gauging the amount of details you need is to ask how familiar or unfamiliar the situation you’re writing about is. The more unfamiliar, the more details you’ll need to give. For example, I had a student who was writing about a mythical colony of semihumans who lived underground. She needed to describe their underground life in fairly thorough detail. By contrast, a book about modern life may require fewer details because we already know what a McDonald’s looks like and how fast the average car can drive.

That doesn’t mean you should eliminate all the details about contemporary life. It’s the job of literary writers in particular to let us see commonplace occurrences as if for the first time—and they can often do that by their careful choice of details. The novelist Sue Miller has a gift for it. In The Good Mother, she describes a laundromat: “The long row of gleaming yellow washers sat silent, lids up, open-mouthed.” Elsewhere: “I liked the laundromat—the way it smelled, the rhythmic slosh of the machines, the ticking of buttons, zippers, in the dryers ….” There’s more, but not much, because we’ve all seen laundromats. But by honing in on a few details, Miller brings this ordinary setting to life.

Whether your style and genre dictate that you shovel or sprinkle on the details, it’s still important to choose well, to make your details earn their living by revealing much in a few words. One well-chosen detail can do the work of twenty banal ones. And when they do, I call them “killer-diller details.”

SPECIFIC DETAILS

Sometimes you can turn a banal detail into a killer-diller one by being specific. Don’t say the man was wearing a suit—tell us it was double-breasted chalkstripe.

Challenge yourself to see just how specific you can get. “A red scarf” might be adequate, but how about a vermilion, crimson, or raspberry one? You might get away with “a stylish car,” but a 1996 Mercedes 450SL in aubergine will tell us more about the person behind the wheel.

Metaphors and similes can help make your details more specific, too. In both cases, the writer is taking a person and comparing him to something else that isn’t there.

If you write, “her face was as expressionless as a hard-boiled egg,” the image of the woman’s face lodges much more solidly in our minds than if you write, “Her face was blank.” The latter, a familiar idiom, passes through the reader’s consciousness without leaving a footprint.

Anne Tyler, in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, writes of “a spindly, starved cat with a tail as matted as a worn-out bottle-brush.” Forever and ever I can perfectly see that cat’s tail.

BEYOND BLUE-EYED BLONDES

Killer-diller details are not the obvious ones. Say your character is walking into a kitchen. Most kitchens have stoves and refrigerators and to tell us that this kitchen does, too, isn’t telling us much. In the name of being specific, you might tell us that the kitchen has a restaurant-style oven with a six-burner range top, or an avocado side-opening General Electric refrigerator, and you’d be telling us more. But you might also try to zero in on what’s in this kitchen that is not in the usual kitchen. A bowl of strawberries from the owner’s own garden. A child’s artwork on the refrigerator (and what does the artwork depict?). A manual Smith-Corona typewriter on the Formica table.

When describing people, beginning writers usually check off hair and eye color. “She was a redhead with green eyes.” Then, if they have any energy left, they may get into general physique and cite the character’s age.

I had a student once whose character descriptions were so formulaic that I suspected her of having created a format in her computer for them. “The thirty-six-year-old brunette mother of two was five-five.” “The twenty-five-year-old blonde beauty was five-foot-eight.”

I had a devil of a time breaking her of this habit, which to her seemed efficient, since it covered a character’s vital statistics in a few words. When I first encouraged her to vary the description, she came up with, “At six-four, the hulky forty-year-old had gray hair and blue eyes.”

It’s true that in real life we often appraise the people we meet casually. If you tried to remember what the waitress at the coffee shop this morning looked like, you might come up with hair color and approximate height, if that. If you’re not “into” houses, you might not remember much about your neighbor’s living room beyond the color of the couch and wing chair.

But paradoxically, in order to make your reader believe in your fiction, it has to be more intense than real life. Documenting only the obvious facts about a character or an environment isn’t enough. Sure, we often want to know what a character’s hair and eye color are, her age and height. But we also need to know what it is about this character, or this couch, or this bowling ball, that is unlike any other person, couch, or bowling ball in the universe. We want to see the one loose button on a man’s shirt. The graffiti scratched in the wood (and perhaps what it says). The Band-Aids on the fingertips of a nail-biter.

DETAILS AS INFORMATION

The facts of how things work are important details. When Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, he made us believe that Sherman McCoy was a bond trader by carefully detailing just how bonds are traded, giving us information that only a bond trader (or someone who had done thorough research) would know.

If you ever saw Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito in the movie Throw Momma From the Train, you know what I’m talking about from its opposite. Billy Crystal is a teacher of fiction writing (there should be more movies about teachers of fiction), and in an early scene in the film, one of his students has written a story about men on a submarine. She reads with great energy. “ ‘Dive! Dive!’ yelled the captain through the thing. So the man who makes it dive pressed a button or something and it dove. And the enemy was foiled again.”

Billy Crystal tactfully points out, “When you write a novel that takes place on a submarine, it’s a good idea to know the name of the instrument that the captain speaks through.” Knowing the names of the various equipment on a submarine is a necessary starting point. The slang expression that Navy personnel use under stress would be a killer-diller detail.

HOW THE PART BECOMES THE WHOLE

In a novel by Ken Kulhken, The Angel Gang, an old man, Leo, receives a beating at the hands of some thugs. At one point, the author describes how the thugs cut a slit in Leo’s eyelid. When Leo closes his eyes, he can see through his eyelid. The image is horrific, but also very specific and concise. The one detail stands in for the whole beating.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you then eliminate all the rest of the description of that beating. As we’ve discussed, the exact number of details and the amount of description you include is a function of your style, the genre, and the content. But always be on the lookout for the killer-diller details that can encapsulate a person, environment, or incident.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams, the narrator describes how her sister Hallie was so honest that, “I’d seen her tape dimes to broken parking meters.” This killer-diller detail becomes the whole person for a moment, allowing us to imagine how she’d act in a hundred different situations. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want or need to know more about Hallie—of course we do, and the more important she is to the book as a whole, the more we’ll want to know. Kingsolver in fact gives us many more killer-diller details to describe her.

AN EXERCISE FOR DETAIL-SPOTTING

There’s a technique for training yourself to produce these killer-diller details. Around dinnertime or later (if you’re a night person), take ten minutes to note the five most interesting things you observed that day. Make this a rigid habit for at least a month.

Now, when I say write down what you observed, I don’t mean the weighty insights you had while watching the clerk bag your groceries. I mean the most specific, and sometimes offbeat, details that you see (or hear, or taste, or smell, or touch). I’m talking about details you might miss if you weren’t paying attention. How does the clerk bag the groceries? Did he have any unusual physical features? Did he ask you a too-personal question that made you uncomfortable?

Maybe while walking up and down the aisles at the store, you noticed that someone had stuck a package of linguine on top of the canned pineapple. Maybe you overheard a pair of twins fighting over who would get to ride in the cart. Those kind of details are hardly earth-shattering. But they’re real and not immediately obvious, the way that writing, “It was a big, crowded grocery store with Muzak playing,” would be obvious—and banal. As you learn to add these types of details judiciously to your scenes, they, too, will become more real.

Here are some things I observed in the past couple of days:

• Two women were talking in Vietnamese, peppering their speech with “Wow!” and “Okay.”

• The bus driver wore a royal blue-purple cable knit sweater that washed out her pale skin and white-blond eyebrows.

• My wedding ring tapping on the banister as I went down the stairs.

• An old man wearing a cardigan that used to be a woman’s; the giveaway was that the buttons were backward.

• A man with a belt-length black beard and a parrot on a leash.

• At the deli, there was a woman wearing the jumpsuit of an American Airlines mechanic. Her name patch said, “Cupcake.”

Remember as you practice observing that it’s not a contest to see what offbeat or dramatic occurrences you can witness. (No extra points for going to a hospital emergency room.) Nor is the goal to come up with details that you can actually use in your novel or story, although you may do that in the process. Rather, the point is to become more aware of what’s going on around you. The point is to learn to mine even familiar surroundings for what’s specific and unique about them. Then use those details in your writing to go beyond blue-eyed blondes, a description that probably fits 15 percent of the population.

Observing and recording your observations are also helpful exercises to get you back into a writing routine when you’ve been away for a while, or when you’re feeling stuck. But the greatest value lies in how your observations will translate, over time, to an improved ability to invent precise, informative, unpredictable details—in other words, killer-diller details that make the reader take notice.

And that’s no lie.

  DONNA LEVIN is the author of Get That Novel Started! and Get That Novel Written!, from which this article was adapted.