Storytellersunplugged

And then there’s that old adage about dealing with life’s pressures that goes, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Yep, keeping your eye on the big picture is always vital. Getting bogged down in niggling details is a good way to send your blood pressure skyrocketing, particularly when, in the overall scheme of things, they’re inconsequential. I know a young woman who can spend three hours trying to figure out which pair of earrings goes with a particular outfit. She’s usually very late to any given destination.

However, I find that, in the literary world, small stuff often has value many times the sum of its wee little parts. There’s a difference between meaningful details and trivial verbiage. Sometimes, without the little things, the big picture isn’t quite what it could or should be.

To offer an example, allow me to pick on Rex Miller’s Slob. Now, you may have adored Slob and Miller’s villainous Chaingang in general, and that’s just fine; however, I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t like Slob, and it’s not because the title character is a very wicked large man. In the main, I find that novel to be empty and lifeless, despite prose that is often manic. Its characters are as dull as three-day-old snow, and its setting is meaningless. At least a portion of the book is said to take place in Chicago, but I’ve never found a word in the novel, other than the city’s name, that would identify the setting as the Windy City. You may say, well, that’s not terribly important, given the thrust of the novel. Perhaps my priorities are different from yours, and that’s okay too, but I happen to find this particular shortcoming one that is both common and more significant than it might appear on the surface.

Fiction, the novel in particular, is very much like a tapestry, with many disparate elements coming together to create an image, or series of them, and when the small stuff is out of alignment, the entire thing is caddywhompus. (I’ll go out on a limb and calculate that you don’t really want a caddywhompus tapestry on your wall.) People and places are integral building blocks of a story, and glossing over little details in the interest of “plot” may actually detract from that ever-important bigger picture. If Miller had for one second convinced me that the events of Slob actually were happening in Chicago, I might have been more willing to buy the rest of what was going on. Instead, I found that the lack of local color only continued to spiral farther out of hand, pulling me farther and farther out of the book.

With Chicago having established itself as a setting of note here, I’m going to pick a little bit—in a different way—on Wayne Allen Sallee, whose name may ring a bell with many of you who read a lot of horror fiction in the late 80s and early 90s. Sallee set much of his work in Chicago, and though his plots often necessitated no such specific setting, the fact that he was forever giving us little glimpses of life in that city, of places that actually exist or might exist, brought home the power of his story in ways that ought to have made Mr. Miller drool. Even one of Sallee’s titles—“Dead Things in Barrington Road”—fills me with intrigue (the fact that I’ve actually driven down Barrington Road notwithstanding) because it lets me know that, no matter how fantastic, there’s something real at the heart of this story. Sallee’s characters usually have little quirks or mannerisms that serve to make them truly human, often a result of some affliction. Sallee has been intimately acquainted with pain in his lifetime, and his fiction usually throbs with it. He paints a picture of what it feels like to have slivers of glass embedded in your skin by offering you small but crucial details, not just of the pain, but—by way of contrast—what the character is seeing in the setting; what other characters are saying in the background; what song is playing somewhere within earshot. Sallee is a master of combining storytelling with the minutiae of the moment.

It’s a style I particularly appreciate.

I attribute the mastery of such style to the writer being a master of observation. Most of the best writers I know will tell you that they are forever watching people, listening to them, making notes—mental or otherwise—about little behaviors, manners of speaking, personal quirks…anything that stands out, no matter how minor. I also tend to be fond of works in which the setting plays an important role—in essence, becoming another character. A location, real or imagined, can be as unique and engaging as the human protagonists and antagonists. One recent example that comes to mind is Nate Kenyon’s novel, Bloodstone—his first, by the way—which features a well-rendered setting, with many hues of local color, even though the place is fabricated. (The novel includes a map of the town, another little touch of verisimilitude that I especially appreciate.)

Here are a few examples of “little things” that I’ve worked into various of my tales because, for whatever reason at the time, they struck me as meaningful.

While at a local restaurant, a young fellow at another table ordered a piece of cake, and it was obviously the most wonderful stuff. While everyone else was cutting up and acting rowdy, he became very subdued and with quiet dignity sat there and enjoyed his cake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so contented—so beatific. I’ve never quite understood why, but in that moment, in that act, I felt something strangely profound—something that made me feel fondness for this fellow I had never met. It was such an unusual feeling that I worked it into a story called “Last Show at Verdi’s Supper Club,” and due to the events that follow, to me, there’s a certain poignancy about the scene, I think, that the story might otherwise lack.

A little detail in a Civil War story that I put before a critique group struck more than one individual as singularly “authentic.” In the scene, a solder is killed by a bayonet—not thrust by an enemy, but hurled as a projectile by a cannon exploding nearby. I had read of this happening in an account of the Battle of Gettysburg, and I thought it noteworthy enough to cannibalize. Was it a strategic plot point? Hardly, but it was one of those unique moments that helped draw readers deeper into the story.

While constructing my novel, Blue Devil Island, over a period of several years, I tracked down all kinds of information about World War II in the Pacific. By way of various combat reports, I learned a lot about the weather in certain areas of the Solomon Islands. If a combat report specified that it was raining over Kahili at 2:30 p.m. on November 3, 1943, then in Blue Devil Island, by God, it’s raining then and there.

Okay, well, that one may be a little extreme perhaps, but hey—I know.

In the end, it’s the mixture of ingredients in a story that determine its success or failure, and details that on the surface seem trivial may add up to a series of hooks that you wouldn’t want to go without. Judicious use of the small stuff may be just the touch of verisimilitude that makes your work more accessible—and more memorable—to your readers.

—Mark Rainey