Part VI: Authenticating Detail and Description

***This post is the sixth in a series of eight weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

“Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction…” – John Gardner

I am so behind on my revisions for this story! This most recent pass-through (the one with a focus on dialogue and subtext)  took much longer to complete than I expected. Even though my story has just five or six partially dramatized scenes --and even fewer passages of dialogue--it took quite some time to hone that dialogue down to only the most meaningful and significant lines. Now it’s time to move on to the next revision pass: authenticating detail and description.

So what does our mentor, the late John Gardner, have to say about detail?

The details in this brief passage from Colm Tóibín’s short story “The Use of Reason” capture only a tiny aspect of who this mother is, but the few, carefully chosen words and details suggest so much more beneath the surface:

“Good authenticating details set a trap that captures a small piece, a tiny aspect, of what’s being described in a way that allows the reader to come to understand what’s being described for himself,” says Dave Koch, author of one of the clearest explanations I’ve read on the subject of authenticating detail. “[Readers] of literary fiction want to be able to figure things out for themselves; they want to do work. When a story allows you to do this sort of work—to come to your own decision, to come to your own conclusions—you participate in that story. And that sense of feeling like you participated, like your opinions and interpretations matter, is a big part of the pleasure you take from reading literary fiction.” Koch gives us five steps to follow to help make our readers feel like they know just enough about a character or place (or whatever it is you’re trying to describe).  To get the whole scoop including some good examples, read the rest of Dave’s article here, on the Gotham Writers’ Workshop site.  The five steps:

1. Make the decision to capture whatever it is you’re trying to describe. Set a trap.

2. Identify details you don’t need for this capturing. Ordinary details are your enemy.

3. Look to unusual details to capture the big picture. Unusual details let readers do work.

4. Lie, cheat, and steal. Do whatever you have to. You don’t necessarily capture the truth by being truthful.

5. Trust the reader. Don’t explain something after you’ve captured it. “Over-explaining takes all the power away from [the] authenticating detail. Avoid that by letting the reader figure things out for himself.”

Author, Monica Wood,  interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks (a wonderful resource for both inspiration and technique) talks about the importance of picking just the right detail when describing something-- a place or character, for instance:

I’m excited to discover that in addition to her novels and short stories Monica has written a number of books on the craft of writing, one of which is Description, a book in the popular “Elements of Fiction Writing” series.  I’m looking forward to checking that one out.

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Dave Koch: "Authenticating Detail" Gotham Writers' Workshop (article first appeared in "The Writer" magazine)

Monica Wood: interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks

Colm Tóibín: "The Use of Reason" in the collection Mothers and Sons

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Part V: Dialogue That Crackles

***This post is the fifth in a series of eight.  Through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

Yikes. By now I should be posting Part VI (or even VII!) of my series of short story exercises, but I’m just getting to Part V.  I may need to extend my self-imposed deadline another week or so.  That’s okay.  The important thing is not that the story gets finished by a certain date, but that however long it takes-- through diligence, determination, and pure pleasure--the story grows and matures into the best story it can be.

One way to accomplish this is to make sure our characters’ interactions radiate heat through conflict, tension, and misunderstanding. Allison Amend, author of the chapter on dialogue in Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide tells us, “more often than not dialogue is a key part of [that] interaction.” You’ve no doubt heard me sing the praises of this book a time or two in this blog... Well, Amend’s chapter, “Dialogue: Talking It Up” is one of the best I’ve read on the subject and is but one more reason to get your hands on a copy now. 

Dialogue is a function of character, as screenwriting guru Syd Field reminds us. Not only does dialogue need to move the story forward but it should also establish relationships, reveal the conflicts of the story and its characters, reveal the characters’ emotional states, and comment on the action: “Your first attempts will probably be stilted, clichéd, fragmented, and strained,” writes Field. “Writing dialogue is like learning to swim; you’re going to flounder around, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.”

Unlike a novel, a short story doesn’t allow time enough to dramatize every single event or to write out every line of dialogue in every conversation that our characters engage in over the course of the story’s telling, so we’ll need to choose thoughtfully.  Last week we made a list of significant, turning-point incidents that will take place in our stories.  This week let’s work on dramatizing them through dialogue.

As Allison Amend tells us, not every conversation needs to be dramatized in direct, line-by-line dialogue.  Sometimes all we need to reveal is a gist of the conversation and we can accomplish that through summary alone (via indirect dialogue) or with a combination of both summary and scene. By way of example she offers us this passage from Tobias Wolff’s short story “Smokers” in which the author uses a mix of both direct and indirect dialogue, sparing the reader “a monotonous conversation, but [giving us] the most important information… in a most economical fashion”:

Writes Amend: “Here we get the gist of the conversation, but then, on an especially significant line, we get the actual quote.” She continues, “So, in addition to asking yourself if a moment should be dialogued or not, you can also ask yourself if direct or indirect dialogue is the best choice for that particular moment.”

Study Amend’s chapter on dialogue to learn lots more:  dialogue conventions, the illusion of reality, subtext, dialect, stage direction in dialogue, character and dialogue, bad dialogue...  You won’t be disappointed.

One more word on dialogue that I’m sure you’ve already heard over and over but is worth keeping in mind as we begin to craft those passages of dialogue in our stories:  Subtext. John Gardner, our mentor for this series of exercises, reminds us to “make our dialogue crackle with feelings not directly expressed.  Remember that in dialogue, as a general rule, every pause must somehow be shown, either by narration (for example, “she paused”) or by some gesture or other break that shows the pause.  And remember that gesture is a part of all real dialogue.  Sometimes, for instance, we look away instead of answering.”

Interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson for The Glimmer Train Guide To Writing Fiction: Building Blocks, author Amy Bloom talks about “writing below the surface”:

Finally, an important note on subtext from Allison Amend:

Allison Amend: “Dialogue: Talking it Up” Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide

Syd Field: Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Amy Bloom: interviewed in The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Interim Exercise: Using Place

While you're waiting for Part V, check out this intriguing exercise I came across on author Meg Waite Clayton's blog about writers. The exercise is actually a writing prompt designed to  jump-start a personal essay, but wouldn't it work beautifully to help discover (and show) a character's secret motivation? Check it out :-)  

Oh, and be sure to check out Meg's website with her very cool, interactive writing desk here.

Part IV: Shape Your Story

  ***This post is the fourth in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

Last week we worked on how to convince the reader that there's a good possibility our protagonists might change their ways by the end of our stories--even if they don’t end up changing at all. If nothing else we’ve at least shown that they’re capable of change, thereby keeping the reader in suspense until the end of the story. And for those of us whose protagonists do change, we’ve come up with a list of incidents designed to convince our readers that the character’s change is not only plausible but, in hindsight, inevitable. Surprising, but inevitable… that’s the key.

I don’t know about you, but when I came up with my list of incidents it became apparent that many of them will need to be shown in flashback (or flash-forward), or another way entirely, but in any instance they’ll likely throw my story events out of chronological order.  So figuring out the best way, the smoothest way, to sequence and transition those events will be crucial.  

When American author Lan Samantha Chang wanted to tell stories based on the lives of her parents and the era in which they grew up in China she realized that, though set in the present, she would need to move backward in time to find the heart of the story, to uncover “the mystery of the past.” In her excellent essay, “Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,” Chang (currently director of the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) writes that “Every story shapes a pattern in time, and its writer must find that shape…. Manipulating sequence can greatly increase a writer’s range, her flexibility and her authority.  A leap backward can dazzle the reader and develop his understanding of the characters.  A complex story may move back and forth in time, creating a spellbinding pattern.  A subtle, chronological telling can draw the reader smoothly into the author’s world, holding him rapt with an awareness of its possibilities.”

Though certainly not as popular in today’s stories as the flashback, much can be gained from the flash-forward, by taking the reader briefly forward in time. Says Chang: “[The flash-forward] can provide us with a startling and revealing vision of the characters’ futures as their present conflicts unfold, helping us understand the present story in a larger context.”

In the first pages of his novel, Giovanni’s Room, author James Baldwin propels the reader forward to the events of a morning that has yet to take place. We learn that the protagonist’s lover is to be guillotined that day and that the protagonist blames himself for what has brought the two of them to this awful place in their lives. The opening, a flash-forward, sets the mood for the novel, and we feel that sense of destiny and significance as we watch, through flashback, the characters meet and fall in love.  The opening of Giovanni's Room:

In another piece by James Baldwin, the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator (an algebra teacher) wants his younger brother Sonny, a musician and a recovering drug addict, to have a normal, “safe” life, away from his old friends and his nightclub music, the jazz that Sonny loves.  The author employs a series of significant flashbacks, some dramatized, some expository, to show the narrator’s change over time.  The transition that thrusts the reader into the past begins at an awkward (for the narrator) family dinner with his wife and Sonny, (their parents are long dead) and hinges on the narrator’s thoughts, his desire to keep his brother “safe”:

Suddenly, without even realizing it, we find ourselves transported back to the narrator’s young adulthood in Harlem, to the early relationships with his parents, his brother, and others, until eventually we come full circle and return to the present, moving on from there. Each stop along this seamless journey through the past is a significant one.  Each event the author chooses to show us not only propels the story forward, but peels back the layers in those early relationships revealing the narrator’s failed attempts at understanding and helping his troubled brother. Through these past incidents Baldwin convinces us that the narrator’s change when it comes is not only plausible, but genuine.

With any sudden shift in time, be it forward or backward, the key of course is to do it without jarring the reader out of the fictional dream you’ve worked so hard to create. Sol Stein (editor, creative writing instructor, and author of nine novels) says “The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience.  The reader is intent on what happens next.  Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier.  If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information.  If we are enthralled, we don’t want to be interrupted.  Therefore, the art of writing flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader’s experience. I’ll show you how it’s done.” … which indeed he goes on to do in Stein on Writing, his fabulous book on craft. Stein gives great practical advice in all areas of craft, with an entire chapter devoted to flashbacks and how and when to use them.  Stein’s books differ from many other books on writing in that his focus is always and foremost on the experience of the reader.

Lan Samantha Chang: "Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,"from Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)

Sol Stein: Stein on Writing
James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin: "Sonny's Blues" from his collection of short stories titled Going To Meet The Man

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot