Why Details Matter by Faye Snowden

How do you work sensory detail in your writing

Last month I had the pleasure of attending the very well-regarded Surrey International Writer’s Conference in Surrey, Canada. I enjoyed conversations with several established talented writers, and new writers intent on improving their craft. Plus, I had the opportunity to provide two workshops as refreshers for experienced writers, and new concepts for those just starting out. Both workshops, Description that Moves Your Story Forward and How to Show, not Tell, relate directly to this week’s question.

Since other bloggers, however, have lifted the curtain on how they include sensory detail in their fiction, I’m going to focus on why doing so is important. 

Sensory detail make readers feel as if they are in the story. Many of us have experienced a jump scare in a horror movie that caused us to clutch our partner’s hand hard enough to break bone. Reading about the smell of roux cooking as the main character prepares gumbo for her mother’s repast may catapult us back to memories of repasts for our own lost mothers. When we as writers shape those twenty-six alphabetic characters into smell, sight, touch, sound, and taste, the readers brain lights up like fireworks on the 4th of July. How can you beat that? Why would you want to?

To answer that question, let’s go back to those Surrey workshops. To prepare, I pulled almost every writing craft book I own from my bookshelf, including a little book I bought in 1986 when I was still in the Navy, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. I believe it’s a first edition, but it’s so beat-on that it’s probably worth pennies. The pages are yellow, dog-eared, and filled with pen marks, pencil marks, and faded orange, blue and pink highlights. All of the other writing books I consulted either implicitly or explicitly led back to this one, proving that while sensory detail is indispensable in writing, so is Gardner’s notion that the writer’s job is to sustain the vivid and continuous dream of the fiction we write— to make the reader believe the lie. 

We don’t want to avoid sensory detail, but there needs to be care in how we use them. They need to not only engage the five senses, but they must be, as Gardner guides us, details that matter. In other words:

• Details should be specific enough that they allow the reader to believe the lie. Specific details convince the reader that the world of your story actually exists. Here is an example from Norman’s Mailer’s, The Naked and the Dead. Tell me, can’t you feel that train moving?

When they let him out of the county workhouse he walks back to town, spends the dollar he has made for a good meal and a package of cigarettes, and catches a freight out of town that night. The moon gives a silver wash to the cornfields, and he curls up in a flatcar and watches the sky. An hour later another hobo drops into his car. He has a flask of whisky and they drink it up and finish Red’s cigarettes. In the flatcar lying on his back the sky quivers in time to the clacking and jolting of the train. It’s not too bad.  From Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, pg. 226

• The reader should be able to make some judgement about the character and the world they live in based on the details you’ve included. The details should convey a meaning or judgement that the reader can make on her own. Your detail should allow for this co-creation of meaning to empower the reader. In a way, you become partners. 
• Don’t tell the reader that the character is sad. Show it through their action, speech, appearance.
• Use the detail in your story to move the plot forward, foreshadow an event, or set the mood. 
• Try not to filter the detail in your story through a character. For example, watch out for details that begin with, “She noticed…,” or “She heard….” Present the detail to the reader directly. 

I don’t always get the detail right in my story, but I do try my best, and it’s usually on the second draft that I examine how I'm using them. My first draft is my free-write. It's messy on purpose. No rules allowed.