Details are what make a piece of writing stand out from the crowd. The details are what sticks in a reader’s mind, long after the book has been closed. The details are what bring the writing to life.
Is writing the details a skill that can be learned, or a talent one is born with? While I don’t know the answer to that, I do know that a writer can improve on that skill by reading like a writer. Here’s an example of a writing exercise that helps me.
When you read a fantastic passage in a novel, read it three times.
- Read it once to get a sense of the story.
- Read it a second time to see how the author created the effect he did.
- Read it a third time to dissect it and figure out how you can do the same with your writing. Focus on the details. It’s the details that make the writing memorable.
Compare these two passages:
“Each year, when people die, relatives forget to stop their mail and it continues to be delivered to the deceased.”
That’s a nice, dry fact, nothing too original or interesting. Now read how Joanne Harris writes about that topic in The Girl With No Shadow.
“It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead. People forget to stop the mail – the grieving widows and prospective heirs – and so magazine subscriptions remain uncanceled; distant friends unnotified; library fines unpaid. That’s twenty million circulars, bank statements, credit cards, love letters, junk mail, greetings, gossip and bills dropping daily onto doormats or parquet floors, thrust casually through railings, wedged into letter boxes, accumulating in stairwells, left unwanted on porches and steps, never to reach their addressee. The dead don’t care.”
The second passage gives vivid examples and details that make the beginning of this book stick in the reader’s mind. The pictures created by the bills dropping onto parquet floors, letters wedged, porches covered in mail, are the details that make this passage memorable.
Now take this simple passage and try to make it memorable.
“The elephant stood in his pen.”
Each day, try a warm up writing exercise like that, and soon enough, the details will begin to flow from your fingertips as you tell your stories.
