details

In search of  a little inspiration recently, I read this NaNoWriMo pep talk by Jonathan Lethem, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Here’s the part that I’m hung up on: “Write like you’d read—and notice how much you customarily skip as you read. Raymond Chandler said that when he was at a loss for a plot development he’d have a man walk through a doorway with a gun in his hand. Good advice I’ve heeded a hundred times or more, but it wasn’t the doorway, it was the gun that might solve your problem.”

In essence, he’s saying don’t get hung up on the little details. Ignore the “nose-blowings of everyday circumstances.” Keep it moving. Focus on the big stuff.

It’s good advice. I think.

The problem for me is that I adore writing about the little details. While I obviously don’t want to painstakingly enumerate every single thing that a character does all day—the boring commute to work, the deciding what to eat for lunch—I do think that it’s the aggregate of all of those things that help me understand my characters. Whether my character listens to NPR or Metallica during her commute matters to me. What she cooks, how she talks (or doesn’t) to the person ringing up her grocery order, what’s in the bag she carries—maybe I don’t want to pore through these things with such detail that a story becomes a chronological journal of everything the characters do all day, but still…the little stuff matters. A lot, I think.

But the question I keep asking myself is whether the little details that I so love writing about are essential to my writing process, and solely that, or whether they’re just as essential for the reader, too? In other words, when I’m dreaming this stuff up and having fun writing about all the extraneous stuff in a character’s life, is it primarily a first draft thing? Is it part of chipping away and figuring out what the essentials are? And if that’s the case, what’s extraneous, really? Is that the toughest part of the job?

Maybe it’s partly that I think of myself as a writer who’s primarily interested in ordinary people and ordinary lives and the way that we handle what looks like the mundane sort of day-in-and-day-out that makes up a life. The mundane is sort of essential, no?

But then I read, “Notice how much you customarily skip as you read.” This makes me wanna barf, because I know how much I skip as I read, and I also know that, in contrast, I am a world-class tinkerer when I write, fretting over every last word choice and getting lost in descriptions that…what? Maybe don’t matter so much?

I’m (quite obviously) working this out in my head as I type. The bottom line is that I think it’s interesting and worthwhile, as a writer, to think about how you write versus how you read and what the differences are between the two. This seems obvious, but I’m discovering that it’s something I haven’t examined too closely.