Beth Kephart: DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS • Writing Tips

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Beth Kephart
DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS

The artisans of the telling detail inhabit language as if it were skin.

They are capable of indelible quietudes, unshowy but unexpected equivalencies: “Darkness spreads softly from the sky, settling on everything like black dew.” (Olga Tokarczuk)

They are masters of nearly clinical precision, of simple-seeming summings-up that, without fanfare, devastate. “There were sixteen double-decker beds on the porch, and one single bed, near the door, for the child who was held to be the most disturbed in any given year.” (Renata Adler)

They recognize that even straightforward sentences bearing straightforward details will become indelible if they are properly sequenced. Like this sentence, which shows up right at the start of the author’s distinctly non-equestrian Autoportrait. “To my knowledge, I have never ridden a horse.” (Jesse Ball)

They have an ear for the words that will slow the reader down, the say-it-again words that force the reader to spend more time inside the rock and rhythm of each sentence: “Another has taken off a tight shoe and sits for a long time voluptuously staring at his liberated foot. Not one is a stranger, so near are the pale eyes, the part in the hair, the touching, sluggish hilarity. (Elizabeth Hardwick) See also: “I visualize myself in the third person, always in the same clothes—a long, scrambled egg-yellow dress, my hair tied back with a white handkerchief—walking along the same street which, I suspect, is a superimposition of many streets.” (Valeria Luiselli)

They are exceedingly talented at adding just a few more beats to a phrase, words that rearrange a reader’s expectations, and demand, again, readerly pause: “I am now listening to a sylvan music, almost just drumming and rhythm that comes from a neighboring house where young junkies live the present.” (Clarice Lispector)

It’s the telling detail that remains with us, that intensifies or accelerates the plot, that says more about a character than an accumulation of ordinary scenes ever have or could. It’s the telling detail that reveals the way the writer sees, and what the writer finally believes tells the story best.

Of course, even the most exquisite detail, if delivered among too many ineffectually aggregated details, will lose its power, its punch. No story, essay, or poem gains from a glut of undifferentiated signifiers, adverbs, adjectives, bright verbs, no matter how fine each detail in isolation might be. A glut of details is nothing but a stomp, a list, a writer showing off.

A glut of details is static. It is dull.

The artisans of the telling details intuit (or learn) which details actually matter and which details do not. Those gunmetal clouds that touch the far edge of the sea, that feather split by a battered fence, that iris snapped by a neighbor’s hand—these details might sit pretty on a page, but pretty alone will never be enough. The telling details must advance the plot, strengthen the portrait, intensify the mood, make a winnable argument for themselves.

Telling details must be propulsive. They are never (they should never be) merely decorative.

There is too much imprecision in this world, an overwhelm of misinformation, a drowning swell of lies. Telling details—whether in fiction or in nonfiction—provide an opportunity to practice the lacerating, essential truth. You see the blossom of the yarrow in just this way (and why?). You hear the pigeons pound the hard glass of the skylight with the sharp nick of their beaks at just his hour (and why?). It takes a very long time to get a telling detail just perfectly right, to place it precisely where it belongs, to leave the glut of other details to the side.

But every time you do, you have told a kind of truth. You have made a claim. You have said, emphatically, this.

National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning writer of more than three dozen books in multiple genres including Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River and Love: A Philadelphia Affair. She is a teacher of memoir, a writer of essays, and a book artist. Her new books are Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life and My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, just released from Temple University Press. Find her at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com.