Strategy Sundays: Who is “in the Details?”

Some people say, “God is in the details.”

Some people say, “the Devil is in the details.”

Well, which one is it?

It is interesting to me that “the details” is the place we have chosen as residence for the {sterotypically assigned} highest good and/or greatest evil. Depending on who you converse with, you are either getting the most incredible of things, or the most terrible.

But what ARE details, anyway?

As a writer, I focus on the details of a situation or experience to draw my readers into the story. With details, I can hook their attention to a specific place, moment, or memory that is a direct line to one of their specific places, moments, or memories. Not just details such as “the sweater was purple” or “the Jack Pine forest,” but niggling little details, things that might seem otherwise insignificant, but are the pieces of the writing that stay with us long after we have put aside the book.

Here’s an example from one of my favorite authors, Virginia Woolf, from her essay The Death of the Moth:

The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside, indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-colored moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew had any chance against death.

In this essay, Woolf writes about watching a tiny day moth struggle to fly out of a closed window. But it isn’t really about a moth, or about the struggle. It is about the futile act that leads to dying. In the above excerpt {and the reason I chose this piece}, Woolf mentions the “hay-colored” nature of the moth. Certainly a descriptor such as the color of the wings might not mean something to you at first read, but I assure you: the next time it is Spring, and you see the moths fluttering through the grass and around windowsills, you will remember this passage. That one simple detail connects a moment in an essay written in 1942 in England to your moment, in any year, in any country. This is an incredible example of a lasting detail.

Another incredible {and favorite} author, Annie Dillard, wrote about the death of a moth in her book Holy the Firm. {If you’ve never read it, please do so. You can read it in an hour or less, and it is so profound.} Let’s look at this excerpt:

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held…And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the shattered hole where her head should have been, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

These two essays, written thirty years apart, are often used in feminist literature courses. Given their similarity, and the shared titles, it is understandable that English professors would use them in critical thinking studies. But for me, these two brief and incredibly profound essays are a study in details. Whether it is God or the Devil, the details are those moments that bring us back to moments in our hearts, stories we have read, places we have long since visited {or perhaps locked away}.

So, how do we capture the details?

In Living in the Mystery, I have an entire section devoted to conjuring and capturing the details in your writing. One of the exercises in that workbook is a favorite of mine from Girl Scout camp, one I have adapted for training writers to notice the details in everyday life. I’ve printed it here for you as a practice, one to cultivate in your daily writing practice and in your storytelling.

Using a plate or pie tin, pull everything from your pockets and place it on the dish. Everything.

Spend a few minutes looking closely at each object without touching them, then cover the items with a towel or other opaque fabric. Use the space below to describe each object that is on the dish WITHOUT using the name of the object in your description. For example: I have three quarters and two pennies in my left pocket, and three bobbypins and a tube of lip balm in my right. These all go onto the dish; when describing them, I am not using any of the above italicized words. The key here is to write with as much detail as possible, thinking outside the box of traditionally-used names for objects.

Next week on Strategy Sundays: Cultivating a daily writing practice.