HARLEY JANE KOZAK

The Telling Detail

HARLEY JANE KOZAK’s debut novel, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards, and it was followed by Dating Is Murder, Dead Ex, and A Date You Can’t Refuse. Her short prose has appeared in Ms., Soap Opera Digest, The Sun, and Santa Monica Review, and in the anthologies Mystery Muses, This Is Chick-Lit, A Hell of a Woman, Butcher Knives and Body Counts, Crimes by Moonlight, and The Rich and the Dead, edited by Nelson DeMille.

 

 

Mysteries and thrillers are famous for their large casts of characters. Typically, you need a victim, a good guy, a bad guy, some allies for the good guy, friends for the bad guy, survivors for the victim, enemies of the good guy, maybe a romantic interest or two, a couple of cops, and a bunch of potential killers. Perhaps a pet. Unless your reader is accustomed to Dostoyevsky, that’s a lot of people to keep straight.

Of course, other literary genres can be densely populated, too, but mysteries and thrillers call for a snappy pace that’s rarely compatible with long character biographies and lengthy descriptions of, for example, shoes—stuff that might feel right at home in literary fiction or romance.

Enter the Telling Detail. This is a description of a character (or a place, state of mind, weather) that takes up relatively little space on the page, but is disproportionately delightful. Or creepy. Intriguing. Evocative.

I find the Telling Detail useful for dealing with two very different problems.

First, there’s the TMI (too much information) syndrome. When you give a lot of page time to someone, or even just a name, you’re telling your reader, “Listen up. This girl’s important to my story.”

But if that girl is there only to drive the cab that transports your Hero from Point A to Point B on page 22, you don’t want the reader to expend any extra energy on her, subliminally waiting for—let’s call her Ursula—to reappear in the story, Ursula with the mother who died of scurvy when Ursula was in kindergarten, leading to the years in foster care, community college, an abusive marriage, a move cross-country, and ultimately her own cab company.

Unless Ursula’s going to die in chapter 5, or reappear to rescue your Hero in chapter 34, save that reader’s emotional investment for your Hero, or your Hero’s cat. Maybe all we need to know about this cab-driving girl is that she’s wearing a Mets baseball cap, when the story is set in Salt Lake City.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s the “Steve who?” dilemma. Let’s say Steve, whom you introduce early on, walks into the plot every hundred pages to do something important, then goes back to Brazil. If your reader says, “Steve? Who the hell is Steve?” at these key moments, it pulls her out of the story.

But it’s mind-numbing to read identifying tags such as “Steve, Harriet’s sister-in-law’s brother” every time Steve puts in an appearance. Not all details are telling; some are dull. Learning someone’s age, eye color, or height, in inches or centimeters, is not compelling, which is why we don’t consider drivers’ licenses literature.

Ditto stock descriptions and overworked adjectives. For instance, you can tell us that a woman is blond and beautiful, or you can tell us—if you’re Raymond Chandler, writing Farewell, My Lovely—that she’s “blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”

So perhaps Steve, Harriet’s sister-in-law’s brother, is middle-aged, plain to the point of invisibility except for one small detail: his nails. Steve has a French manicure.

Or let’s take William. William has a lot of body hair, peeping out from beneath his shirt collar and all over his arms and the backs of his hands. Sarah is transfixed by his hair, stares at it while he snaps on latex gloves, is so distracted by it that she can hardly hear what he’s saying about cervical cancer. With that much hair, she thinks, William should be an auto mechanic or a big game hunter, something other than a gynecologist. This gives us a mental bookmark, so that when we encounter gynecologist William later on, we stand a chance of remembering him, or at least remembering Sarah’s feeling about him, without having to flip back through the pages to find him.

EXERCISE

Here’s the exercise: Find some people. Real people are best (as opposed to TV people) standing in a line, riding the subway, waiting on you at Starbucks. Jot down as many Telling Details as you can, one per person.

Avoid these words: pretty, handsome, beautiful, ugly, cute, awesome, or anything you’d see in ad copy or a political campaign. Brevity is fine, but not critical. Sometimes the Telling Detail takes a single word and expands on it. “Underweight” becomes “She was thin. Not just ‘I watch my carbs’ slender, but ‘I swallowed a tapeworm’ skinny.” “Elderly” becomes “She had grandmother hair, so fragile and fine and soft it might have been lint plucked from a clothes dryer and stuck atop her head.”

The world abounds with singularity, often better than what our imagination can supply when we’re sitting in front of our computer screens. The purpose of this exercise is to find fresh ways of describing human beings in an age of e-mail, tweets, and online profiles (“Likes family values & walks on the beach”). To paint a better picture. To surprise ourselves.