I like that these “realistic” small details can seem so inconsequential but that they can also offer so much to a story without being implicitly apparent.
For example, say you’re writing a war story and you have the main character walk past the corpse of an enemy sniper. You have the main character notice dozens upon dozens of tally marks engraved in the wooden stock of the sniper’s gun. This detail alone hints at a past that entwines both the deceased and the weapon/object in a somewhat ambiguous and grim backstory.
In the example of Rosemary's Baby it really is meaningful description in that it helps provoke the reader to think more about the item and even question the significance of it. And as you mentioned... tell about the character. All in very few words.
Oh man I just started reading "Ice at the Bottom of the World" (per your recommendation) and I noticed that his descriptions were consistently and subtly engrossing. I wasn't sure why and you just verbalized it. Great stuff!
What comes first? The audience, the atmosphere, the action, or the…. whatever else I dunno I’m trying to sound smart.
Ok take two: I think it terms of worlds and prose that embody the essence of Da Vinci’s quote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
How would you take the art of balancing an inquisitive (albeit black / white) hypothetical mind, vs. the romantic one? If the “half-eaten apple” paints a picture as one that is self-evident to the definition of the words, how would you describe the apple in a way to curate the character, looking at the half-eaten apple with a perspective take?
My bias is the habit of over-exaggerated stories, as in, hyperbolic ones, emphasized to the Nth degree. My upbringing has been around a series of over-expressions of individual perspectives, and like I said, my bias towards simplicity is, the ultimate sophistication to me. I can get pretty tuned out pretty fast by the descriptive genius, but truly have encountered a truth of myself, hence my question, that PERSPECTIVE is everything. I am aspiring to write myself well, and definitely have to work on balancing these perspectives in my writing.
This made me think of the first moments in the movie Rounders. Mike grabs his roll and for a second we pick up a worn out Poker Book. Not any worn out Poker book, no, It's the painfully boring ultra-important Mike Caro's Book of Tells. A small detail that I've only realised it's significance until now. Chuck, you should charge money for this stuff.. ALL of it.
Love this entry! Now that I’ve also read one of your co-teacher’s novels (One Kick, which was, naturally, thrilling) I find myself falling finding the obvious example in her work (Scrabble tile, again). Along with the incomplete/unique angle, it also brings questions. I’m beginning to see writing somewhat as sowing a field of questions/misdirections with the goal being a degree of clarity at the end. Really never thought that way before. Thanks for broadening the horizon!
In Alan Bennett's diaries he makes a very interesting point - he references seeing something in the street (if my memory serves it's a group of nuns carrying balloons) and points out how something like that would never happen in a book or film unless it's specifically part of the plot or has a point. Reality throws up these strange things all the time as you walk around life. I wonder if it's possible to incorporate this aspect of life without derailing plot?
Thanks for emphasizing that tension doesn’t have to be some grand murder-mystery. I think that this is something that’s easy to misunderstand, and I misunderstood it a lot at first. One thing that I’ve done (similar to your suggested exercises of writing lists of physical gestures and transitional phrases) is to think through things that create tension and stress in my own life.
Bosses who won’t acknowledge questions that they don’t want to answer, opposing family members who press politics or religion, talking to neighbors when there is some sort of impending issue that must come to a head, waiting on blood work to come back from a wound that isn’t healing, etc. These examples are somewhat broad, but what I do is I think about the specific actions and circumstances that made that situation stressful.
For example, the massive dying oak in my backyard is leaning over everyone’s power lines and also covers half of my neighbor’s yard. Not only that, but it is continually shedding branches onto her property and she’s elderly and low income. She keeps dealing with these branches, but neither of us have talked about it. I can save significant money if I have the power company take it out (free), but then there would be more coordination with having to pay for a separate company to remove the branches in both yards. All of this stress because I don’t know if she’ll understand or what she’ll say. Or I could just wing it and wait for it to fall and pray that it doesn’t take out both of our fences in the process of pulling down the power lines (won’t be doing that).
I really enjoy when a story implies history. I always think of the opening to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indy is sitting at the table trying to make a deal and it's implied that one of the bad guys had visited him the night before trying to steal the item. It shows the guy's hand bandage. It's such a small moment but It always stirs my imagination wondering what had happened. Like in Aliens or Annihilation. The characters show up after the fact and you know some crazy shit went down.
Thanks for this. Question: you said, “You want to pile up small incomplete issues. Incomplete objects or lies or half-eaten food or unanswered questions. Make your reader carry the burden of unresolved stuff. That’s tension.”
Are you required to resolve all of these at some point in the story?
As I am typing this I think maybe it is a stupid question, but I am going to click post anyhow…
Is it just me or does the descriptor "amazing" set anyone else off into a low key rage? Everyone uses it now and why? Everyone has a thesaurus in their back pocket. It's the Karen of descriptors.
Nice tidbit tip, thank you CP. Looking forward to digging into all your posts as my novel starts brewing and I maintain the confidence to stick with it. Just finished Consider This and have been reading you for 25 years. My biggest problem: how do i write something that doesn't feel like a Chuck knock off.
Ok I think I did the assignment correctly. Here goes... I had a dream about you last night Mr. Palahniuk. Let me explain. You didn’t do anything humiliating. You were teaching me how to fight. You said “Candice, you’re far too small and old to be going toe-to-toe with anyone besides a 10 year old and even then it will probably be a wash. You need to always carry around one of the large, heavy, glass ashtrays that your mother used to smoke with all day and use that to wail on anyone coming at you.”
"A crass, cheap devil worshiper." I feel called out. Nice.
I like that these “realistic” small details can seem so inconsequential but that they can also offer so much to a story without being implicitly apparent.
For example, say you’re writing a war story and you have the main character walk past the corpse of an enemy sniper. You have the main character notice dozens upon dozens of tally marks engraved in the wooden stock of the sniper’s gun. This detail alone hints at a past that entwines both the deceased and the weapon/object in a somewhat ambiguous and grim backstory.
In the example of Rosemary's Baby it really is meaningful description in that it helps provoke the reader to think more about the item and even question the significance of it. And as you mentioned... tell about the character. All in very few words.
Oh man I just started reading "Ice at the Bottom of the World" (per your recommendation) and I noticed that his descriptions were consistently and subtly engrossing. I wasn't sure why and you just verbalized it. Great stuff!
Hello Chuck. This is Devil’s advocate speaking,
What comes first? The audience, the atmosphere, the action, or the…. whatever else I dunno I’m trying to sound smart.
Ok take two: I think it terms of worlds and prose that embody the essence of Da Vinci’s quote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
How would you take the art of balancing an inquisitive (albeit black / white) hypothetical mind, vs. the romantic one? If the “half-eaten apple” paints a picture as one that is self-evident to the definition of the words, how would you describe the apple in a way to curate the character, looking at the half-eaten apple with a perspective take?
My bias is the habit of over-exaggerated stories, as in, hyperbolic ones, emphasized to the Nth degree. My upbringing has been around a series of over-expressions of individual perspectives, and like I said, my bias towards simplicity is, the ultimate sophistication to me. I can get pretty tuned out pretty fast by the descriptive genius, but truly have encountered a truth of myself, hence my question, that PERSPECTIVE is everything. I am aspiring to write myself well, and definitely have to work on balancing these perspectives in my writing.
This made me think of the first moments in the movie Rounders. Mike grabs his roll and for a second we pick up a worn out Poker Book. Not any worn out Poker book, no, It's the painfully boring ultra-important Mike Caro's Book of Tells. A small detail that I've only realised it's significance until now. Chuck, you should charge money for this stuff.. ALL of it.
Love it! It's all in the details. Thanks Chuck!
Love this entry! Now that I’ve also read one of your co-teacher’s novels (One Kick, which was, naturally, thrilling) I find myself falling finding the obvious example in her work (Scrabble tile, again). Along with the incomplete/unique angle, it also brings questions. I’m beginning to see writing somewhat as sowing a field of questions/misdirections with the goal being a degree of clarity at the end. Really never thought that way before. Thanks for broadening the horizon!
In Alan Bennett's diaries he makes a very interesting point - he references seeing something in the street (if my memory serves it's a group of nuns carrying balloons) and points out how something like that would never happen in a book or film unless it's specifically part of the plot or has a point. Reality throws up these strange things all the time as you walk around life. I wonder if it's possible to incorporate this aspect of life without derailing plot?
Thanks for emphasizing that tension doesn’t have to be some grand murder-mystery. I think that this is something that’s easy to misunderstand, and I misunderstood it a lot at first. One thing that I’ve done (similar to your suggested exercises of writing lists of physical gestures and transitional phrases) is to think through things that create tension and stress in my own life.
Bosses who won’t acknowledge questions that they don’t want to answer, opposing family members who press politics or religion, talking to neighbors when there is some sort of impending issue that must come to a head, waiting on blood work to come back from a wound that isn’t healing, etc. These examples are somewhat broad, but what I do is I think about the specific actions and circumstances that made that situation stressful.
For example, the massive dying oak in my backyard is leaning over everyone’s power lines and also covers half of my neighbor’s yard. Not only that, but it is continually shedding branches onto her property and she’s elderly and low income. She keeps dealing with these branches, but neither of us have talked about it. I can save significant money if I have the power company take it out (free), but then there would be more coordination with having to pay for a separate company to remove the branches in both yards. All of this stress because I don’t know if she’ll understand or what she’ll say. Or I could just wing it and wait for it to fall and pray that it doesn’t take out both of our fences in the process of pulling down the power lines (won’t be doing that).
I really enjoy when a story implies history. I always think of the opening to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indy is sitting at the table trying to make a deal and it's implied that one of the bad guys had visited him the night before trying to steal the item. It shows the guy's hand bandage. It's such a small moment but It always stirs my imagination wondering what had happened. Like in Aliens or Annihilation. The characters show up after the fact and you know some crazy shit went down.
Thanks for this. Question: you said, “You want to pile up small incomplete issues. Incomplete objects or lies or half-eaten food or unanswered questions. Make your reader carry the burden of unresolved stuff. That’s tension.”
Are you required to resolve all of these at some point in the story?
As I am typing this I think maybe it is a stupid question, but I am going to click post anyhow…
Is it just me or does the descriptor "amazing" set anyone else off into a low key rage? Everyone uses it now and why? Everyone has a thesaurus in their back pocket. It's the Karen of descriptors.
Nice tidbit tip, thank you CP. Looking forward to digging into all your posts as my novel starts brewing and I maintain the confidence to stick with it. Just finished Consider This and have been reading you for 25 years. My biggest problem: how do i write something that doesn't feel like a Chuck knock off.
Ok I think I did the assignment correctly. Here goes... I had a dream about you last night Mr. Palahniuk. Let me explain. You didn’t do anything humiliating. You were teaching me how to fight. You said “Candice, you’re far too small and old to be going toe-to-toe with anyone besides a 10 year old and even then it will probably be a wash. You need to always carry around one of the large, heavy, glass ashtrays that your mother used to smoke with all day and use that to wail on anyone coming at you.”
Come at me bros.