Spare me the details

details--one or more portions of a larger vision of a character, a place, system, institution, or thing; a discreet, identifying trait; pieces of a defining trait; traces of emotional elements in a story.

In order to be effective as ingredients in a story, details must have embedded in them a feeling or the power to evoke a feeling. Details are the useful adjectives and adverbs, humming about a narrative like mosquitoes on a summer afternoon, looking for a landing site. Details may also contain facts but they are best presented as though they also bore emotions, which is to say that facts presented only as empirical sources will lead to boredom. Readers want accuracy in their details but when they turn to story, the facts they are after are insights and revelations about human and animal behavior.

There is a relationship between the degree of confidence a writer has and the control with which that writer deploys details, the more confident the less the need for details. The more comfortable with the reach of the story, the less likely the writer will feel the need to defend rather than merely tell the story.

Hint: Avoid laundry lists. Use only those details that relate to the narrative point of view (as opposed to the need for the author to intervene). Each character will have thresholds of awareness, sensitivity, tolerance. A character who is a painter or photographer will have an eye for nuances of light. A musician will be more likely to not details of a voice or sound. A chef might have a nose for the subtle smells and flavors of an atmosphere. A prepubescent child will experience details of time in a different manner than a septuagenarian. As the writer "becomes" and takes on the sensitivity of his own characters, the writer will experience a sense of the right impressions and details for each character. More than any use of physical details in her portrayal of her character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, author Denise Mina focuses on Paddy's frustrating encounters with diet, the extreme measures she sometimes takes, how she falls off the dietary wagon, and how she dresses, hopeful of effecting a camouflage.

In his novel Brooklyn, Colm Toibin allows his Irish characters a differing set of awareness than his Italian characters, allowing readers of neither ethnicity a richer vision into their respective cultures. He is similarly apt in his depiction of sports fans, and the feel of commercial and domestic settings. In her novel The Shipping News, Annie Proulx uses detail to produce the sense of cold in the Newfoundland setting with stunning effect. More to the point, neither Toibin nor Proulx over detail; each uses excellent choice in the amount and the way the detail is brought into context.

At one time--the 1940s and 50's--writers of the so-called Naturalist inclination thought to define their characters through lists of products they used, types of clothing they wore, specific foods they enjoyed or detested. For all their sincerity and devotion to their approach, their characters stood out for readers in the details of their actions and attitudes.

Wile E. Coyote: The Things He Carried

products--equipment, merchandise, devises used by characters to advance story; material goods used by writers to denote living conditions, relative affluence, degrees of decadence, boredom inherent in characters; things people want or conspicuously do not want in stories.

Nowhere in stories are products given a more substantive and metaphoric treatment than the cartoon adventures of Wile E. Coyote. In these iconic dramatic ventures, Coyote lurches forth, a faithful replication of Mark Twain's description of the species from Roughing It. Coyote's hunger prods him to consider as prey The Roadrunner; the extensive number of Coyote-Roadrunner cartoons a monument to Coyote's abject failure. The rules surrounding the Wile E. Coyote landscape are myriad and inflexible, at once rendering the terrain a cross breed between Beckett and Krazy Kat. Coyote must not catch Roadrunner. Coyote's attempts at catching Roadrunner invariably end in his humiliation. Coyote may use devices such as explosive tennis balls, giant mouse traps, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and female Roadrunner costumes, but these and all others like them must come directly from the Acme Corporation. No other organization, neither Kafkan bureaucracies nor Orwellian imperialists, is so catholic in its offered menu of product; no government or manufacturer has such a smorgasbord of devices which, taken in totality, could be seen to represent the quintessential formula for curing all ails and supplying answers for all needs. In point of fact, some of the items on the Acme Corporation's list work, they simply do not work for Wile E. Coyote. But rules are rules, meaning Coyote has no recourse; if he is to use products, they must come from Acme.

Probably based on the ubiquity and comprehensiveness of the original Sears-Roebuck mail order catalogues, the Acme Corporation's arsenal of products and their built-in exclusivity for Wile E. Coyote become a metaphor for the writer who is setting forth, beginning with a particular landscape or locale, then basic rules of engagement between the major characters, then the source of materials the characters have at their disposal.

Wile E. Coyote's credit seems to be good so far as Acme Corporation is concerned; there don't seem to be any issues about accounts receivable. There are neither long, elaborate rationales about the Coyote-Roadrunner landscape nor the rules governing it. Neither, for that matter, are there distracting questions about the landscape within Beckett plays; Beckett stories hold up while being read, then become iron filings attracted to the magnet of the mind after the reading or witnessing ends. Similarly with Coyote and Roadrunner.

The message from Beckett ("Fail again, only next time, fail better.") inheres in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons; the after-the-fact paradigm of the cartoons with respect to story also becomes apparent with a personal deconstruction of the entire, precipitous southwestern mesa-butte landscape of the cartoon series.

Tim O'Brien has written a splendid account of American servicemen in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, a novel in which products play a major role in defining character and dramatic outcome. In the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote's frequent fate is having his hair singed off, falling to bottoms of steep declivities, being squashed by falling rocks or even the occasional debris from an Acme Corporation product; sometimes Coyote sustains all these fates simultaneously. O'Brien's characters inevitably reveal a distinct, moving relationship to a product, whether the product is a letter from a loved one (or a Dear John letter), a keepsake, a weapon. Coyote and O'Brien's "grunts" are set forth in an atmosphere and landscape that could not have suited Beckett better, thus is there a transcendent plateau reached and recognized when the writer brings characters with purpose and products to a locale, imbues them with constraints, restraints, and possibly even conscience.