When we envision a scene, we tend to limit the décor to relevant things. For example, take a second to picture a restaurant. You probably thought of tables, chairs, people eating, maybe a few more generic details.
But when you think of a particular restaurant, at a particular place and time—or better yet, when you look closely at a restaurant the next time you go to one (and listen closely, plus touch, smell, taste)—you'll see there are plenty of details that aren't generic at all. Perhaps there are posters on the wall; perhaps there's a table of kids having a birthday party; perhaps the air-conditioning is bone-chillingly cold. (I haven't even mentioned the smell of food, the tank full of live lobsters, and the bell that rings when an order is ready.)
Details like this can lift a generic restaurant scene into something more specific...but they're still pretty predictable. They're typical restauranty things. To introduce a dash more life into a scene, add something that isn't so typical. For example, the server who serves the VPC might have a splash of spaghetti sauce on his shirt, and he might keep apologizing, "Some kid hit me with this, and I don't have a clean shirt here, and we're too busy for me to go home." This sort of passing detail is still quite believable, but it lifts the scene from the generic into something that truly puts a picture in the reader's mind. A generic restaurant is vague; sauce on the shirt is vivid.
One of my writing teachers called this an
"impertinence": a detail that makes a scene more tangible
because
it's not the same-old same-old. Notice that the sauce
splash isn't weird or out of place; it's just different
enough from
common experience that it feels like the VPC is describing
something that actually happened. The scene becomes
more real in the reader's mind—it changes from
"generic restaurant" to "I was at East Side Mario's last
night, and
this guy who was taking our order had this great big smear
down his shirt..."
| Too often, the only things we put into a scene are the relevant things: stuff that's required by the plot, or stuff that has to be there because of the nature of the setting (for example, a normal restaurant has to have tables). But real life doesn't restrict itself to relevant things...and you can make a scene feel more real if you toss in an impertinent detail now and then. This gives the reader the impression you're talking about a specific occasion ("the night our waiter had ketchup on his shirt") rather than action taking place in a vacuum. |
Copyright © 2001, James Alan Gardner