I’ve been told that one of my strengths in my short fiction is my ability to distill a moment down to one important detail. While I am only a so-so judge of my own work, I do know that I purposefully focus on details to illuminate the meaning of a story. Whether it works is a different story. I have also been told that this ability to zoom in on a single image, thought, detail might not carry over to the novel form. Big difference between six pages and three-hundred.
While I writing the first draft of my novel, I haven’t been too concerned about transmitting a technique I use in short stories to the longer form. Until, that is, I began work on my newest chapter. It’s a transition chapter at best; at worst, it will never be included. But the words need to be written because it is all back-story for my protagonist that will directly influence another character’s decision. Somehow this information needs to be given and the best I could come up with for now is a break in my third-person point of view to a first-person account of his childhood and early adulthood. I might eliminate this chapter during revisions if I can find a better way – dialogue, flashbacks, what have you.
As I was working on the chapter this weekend, I began to offend myself with my liberal use of small details. In my defense, I like to think that well-planned, distinct details can really provide a lot of bang for your buck. One ideal detail can demonstrate a character’s entire world view.
But these were by no means ideal details. They were first draft details. The worst kind.
I have to cut myself some slack. Maybe some will stay in the story. Maybe some are just in there as markers for me to remember how I want a character or setting to be imagined. I just need to push through this chapter to get to the next in which the action picks up again. I’ll fix them during revisions.
This concern recalled a book I recently finished, Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre. Overall, a good book. A biographer journeys to France to research Debussy but is actually searching for her family’s past. A parallel story set in 1891 intertwines with the present. History, France, romance – I’ll take it.
One thing irked me about Sepulchre, a small detail relating to details. In the modern day chapters, especially in the first couple of them, the protagonist is described as pulling on Banana Republic jeans or sporting an Abercrombie & Fitch sweater. Now, I have nothing wrong with these two brands (see this lovely dress and pair of jeans here) except that I can’t really afford them.
What I want to know is why these details mattered.
Our heroine, Meredith, is at the end of her Ph.D., most likely not making a ton of money. We actually learn of her financial woes because she keeps checking her bank account online until her book advance is deposited. So does she spend all her money on name-brand items and subsist on Ramen? Does her adoptive mother splurge on expensive clothes to make up for Meredith’s troubled childhood? After I finished reading Sepulchre, it seemed that there was no answer for those stand-out details.
I assume that Mosse wanted to find strong ways to delineate between the heroine of the present – Meredith – and the heroine of 1891 – Léonie. I felt she had already succeeded in that by her shift in narrative tone. Even though all chapters are in the third-person, Leonie’s chapters feel stiffer and Meredith’s read modern. The sentences are longer and more formal for the past and shorter and chattier for the present.
Mosse must have felt that adding details like Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch would ground Meredith in the present. Those details only served to catch my attention and raise questions that I don’t think the author ever intended as important. It doesn’t matter what brands Meredith wears so long as she is comfortable enough to traipse through a cemetery and search the past for clues.
This is unlike chick-lit, or at least chick-lit about women focused on fashion. Name-dropping about labels is required in those books because that is how those characters see the world. And even then sometimes it gets to be a little much. At least those details are appropriate to the tone of the genre.
These label-specific details stand out in the way I fear my clunker images will: bright and atrocious and remembered after the last page is read. For now, I’ll let my terrible first draft details stand. They are by no means name-dropping details but they are my personal brand of details and way too heavy-handed at this point. They’ll last as long as the first draft takes and then it’s the red pen for them! Unless, of course, I really like one and decide to keep it.
While I writing the first draft of my novel, I haven’t been too concerned about transmitting a technique I use in short stories to the longer form. Until, that is, I began work on my newest chapter. It’s a transition chapter at best; at worst, it will never be included. But the words need to be written because it is all back-story for my protagonist that will directly influence another character’s decision. Somehow this information needs to be given and the best I could come up with for now is a break in my third-person point of view to a first-person account of his childhood and early adulthood. I might eliminate this chapter during revisions if I can find a better way – dialogue, flashbacks, what have you.
As I was working on the chapter this weekend, I began to offend myself with my liberal use of small details. In my defense, I like to think that well-planned, distinct details can really provide a lot of bang for your buck. One ideal detail can demonstrate a character’s entire world view.
But these were by no means ideal details. They were first draft details. The worst kind.
I have to cut myself some slack. Maybe some will stay in the story. Maybe some are just in there as markers for me to remember how I want a character or setting to be imagined. I just need to push through this chapter to get to the next in which the action picks up again. I’ll fix them during revisions.
This concern recalled a book I recently finished, Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre. Overall, a good book. A biographer journeys to France to research Debussy but is actually searching for her family’s past. A parallel story set in 1891 intertwines with the present. History, France, romance – I’ll take it.
One thing irked me about Sepulchre, a small detail relating to details. In the modern day chapters, especially in the first couple of them, the protagonist is described as pulling on Banana Republic jeans or sporting an Abercrombie & Fitch sweater. Now, I have nothing wrong with these two brands (see this lovely dress and pair of jeans here) except that I can’t really afford them.
What I want to know is why these details mattered.
Our heroine, Meredith, is at the end of her Ph.D., most likely not making a ton of money. We actually learn of her financial woes because she keeps checking her bank account online until her book advance is deposited. So does she spend all her money on name-brand items and subsist on Ramen? Does her adoptive mother splurge on expensive clothes to make up for Meredith’s troubled childhood? After I finished reading Sepulchre, it seemed that there was no answer for those stand-out details.
I assume that Mosse wanted to find strong ways to delineate between the heroine of the present – Meredith – and the heroine of 1891 – Léonie. I felt she had already succeeded in that by her shift in narrative tone. Even though all chapters are in the third-person, Leonie’s chapters feel stiffer and Meredith’s read modern. The sentences are longer and more formal for the past and shorter and chattier for the present.
Mosse must have felt that adding details like Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch would ground Meredith in the present. Those details only served to catch my attention and raise questions that I don’t think the author ever intended as important. It doesn’t matter what brands Meredith wears so long as she is comfortable enough to traipse through a cemetery and search the past for clues.
This is unlike chick-lit, or at least chick-lit about women focused on fashion. Name-dropping about labels is required in those books because that is how those characters see the world. And even then sometimes it gets to be a little much. At least those details are appropriate to the tone of the genre.
These label-specific details stand out in the way I fear my clunker images will: bright and atrocious and remembered after the last page is read. For now, I’ll let my terrible first draft details stand. They are by no means name-dropping details but they are my personal brand of details and way too heavy-handed at this point. They’ll last as long as the first draft takes and then it’s the red pen for them! Unless, of course, I really like one and decide to keep it.
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