Details Help Writers Overcome Their Fear

A close-up of witch hazel blossoms.
by Anita Gould | via Flickr

Note from Jane: In today’s guest post, writer Benjamin Vogt discusses how evoking sensory details in writing can banish a writer’s fears.


Writers are scaredy-cats. We go in fear of lots of stuff, like sharing our true thoughts or wondering how others will think of us. We obsess too often, or too long, over the ethereal matter that curtails our power and potential. With the door closed, the room silent, we’re left not just with our words, but with every last morsel of doubt, apprehension, longing, and hopelessness that in the end can make writing incredibly moving and gut busting.

What we don’t go in fear of enough is abstraction. Vagueness. We need to paint an accurate picture of a moment or place in sensory detail that allows anyone else to be impacted or fully involved, physically and emotionally. What’s more, an almost over-the-top obsession with sensory detail is what will help an early draft overcome the monkeys on our back. Fear, lack of confidence, lack of direction—these all vanish when we pay attention to the sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound of a moment.

Here’s an example from a recent student of mine, Mimm Patterson. This is her initial description of a place central to an essay about her family history:

I think I walked on Hawk Mountain for the first time after my friends Becky and Donna talked me into joining the local 4H club when I was in junior high. We climbed to the North Lookout, before they carved stairs from the Tuscarora sandstone that make it easier to find the quartz and shale outcrop. I remember looking out over the landscape, towards Bake Oven Knob and then down toward the River of Rocks, a geological formation pushed together by bullying glaciers. I felt free and lost. Free and lost. I was let loose by the air on my skin and the solid earth under my feet.

It’s not bad writing. The pace and sentence structure feel right, and we have specific names to help ground us in one moment. But it lacks real evocation of a place, and that lack of sensory detail is what will keep us writers from breaking through to the other side—the deeper subjects we know we’re pointing toward consciously or not.

Here is Mimm’s revision:

This mountain is all too beautiful. I am standing on the right side of a prominence filled with light and shadow and built of earth and boulders made from strong quartz, shale and Tuscarora sandstone. The sun cuts sharp edges between the flat bright surfaces and black molten folds of this ancient rubble. It is fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. To my left the variegated grey slabs rise for another twenty-one feet and form a second peak which has built around it a corral of wood to protect distracted birders from straying too close to the edge. On a point that juts into the ether and one that no one would dare stand there’s a pole of stripped pine and perched on top of that pole is the stuffed, feathered Great Horned Owl. It is set there each year during fall migration and is so lifelike she takes new climbers by surprise. You can hear them as they approach on the final ascent. First comes the quiet gasp of shock and sometimes the whispered ‘Look! It’s an owl!’, the release of air with the realization they’ve been fooled and then a soft chuckle of delight. Occasionally, if the climbers are young, you’ll hear the added ‘It’s not real, stupid’ and then more laughs. You can almost feel the poke in the ribs.

Hot tamales! Now that’s writing! The author has taken the time to bring us to her physical place, which will soon open the door to the psychological and emotional place. Any one of the details can become a metaphor, a touchstone, to help guide the writing into more open and honest territory. Soon, Mimm will discuss the mountain as refuge and teacher as she confronts a troubled past with her mother and herself in a small town. It’s the details, the patience to describe, that allow writers to gain confidence and momentum. But here’s Mimm in her own words: “Developing the sensory details stirred something in me—woke something up in my heart. My story—the one I am still struggling to tell—gained new life and became more accessible to me. Focusing on the sensory details of a place and time in my past offered the clarity and courage I needed to dive deeper.”


Learn more about Ben’s 10-week course, All in the Family, starting Feb. 1, 2016.

Share on:
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

6 Comments
oldest
newest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Richard Mabry

The addition of sensory attributes may be all well and good in the classroom, but I think it went too far in this case. I’m afraid that, although I found the initial paragraph interesting, I tended to skip ahead and skim the second. Sorry to disagree, but then again (as we say in Texas), that’s why they make Fords and Chevrolets. Thanks for letting us participate.

Benjamin Vogt

Every time we express a thought in writing it’s a classroom. We are all teachers — to ourselves and each other — when we craft language. That being said, I don’t see sensory details as window dressing or attributes (I’m not sure if that’s what you meant, but it seemed like it); instead, sensory details are the heart of the story, the creaking open of doors to let light come in, symbols that give us permission to go deeper and be more authentic. Every detail helps us remember a feeling or an event, and when the details become the focus of a moment or scene, that moment or scene will create others as memory gets pulled to the surface, digested, and grappled with as the memoirist explores their complex being. I guess what I’m saying is that when we focus on the specific we give ourselves permission to openly explore the recesses of our psyche, and to do so in a way that honors our lives.

tracikenworth

This is interesting to know. I thought readers wanted less details these days because they tend to skim but I always find it fills the world out better.

Jessi Rita Hoffman

Richard and Benjamin, I think you both are right. I agree with Richard that the second paragraph is less engaging–to a reader–than the original version. I would not like to see it in the final draft of the story without some heavy editing.

At the same time, it’s true that focusing on the sensory aspects of a scene can draw writers out of their self-consciousness and more deeply into the story itself– in the same way that “mindfulness” philosophy advises centering yourself in an emotionally challenging situation by focusing on the sensory details of the here-and-now. That focus is grounding, and it can help a writer (or an actor, in the case of drama) get deeply into the characters and the situation being written about. But this is writer preparation, a writer tool–not a way to write publication-ready content.

The Jane Friedman blog recently featured an article on the danger of going too deeply into sensory description. You can find that article here: https://janefriedman.com/descriptions/ It is talking about end-product writing, not writing to help yourself find your footing. Big difference. What works in the one case does not necessarily work in the other.

Memoir writing can entail emotional hurdles that fiction writing does not. I’m coaching a woman on the writing of her memoir who has found herself stuck in writing about her mother. She has learned to compartmentalize the pain of her childhood, and that works fine for her life, but when she writes about her mother, that emotionally empty attitude leaves the writing dead, without any empathy. Her mother ends up sounding like an ogre–an unbelievable, one-dimensional character–instead of a real human being with reasons why she became the difficult person she has become. My client has to go deeper into herself, into her understanding of her mom, to raise the memoir from a get-it-off-my-chest dump-all to a story that truly can engage the reading, a story rich in humanity and insight. And that requires the author going deeper within herself. It’s not something writing strategies alone can fix.

Dayle

Writing always provide things that would get writers to fear, especially for new writers. We just need to know what we are doing, trust your self and have fun while writing.

trackback

[…] Details Help Writers Overcome Their Fear […]