The Details Cannot Be Ignored

Crafting characters through the senses

I’ve been thinking a lot about noticing, how our worlds are shaped by what we see and what we don’t see, what we actively look at and what we try to ignore. There’s an entire psychology of character in what we take for granted and what we pour our attention into. writing, storytelling, or narrative in particular, depending on the form or length, is often about what is said or left unsaid, what is provided or left out. The shorter the length, the more that has to be left out, but that doesn’t mean that the deepest thing isn’t said. We can reveal characters’ barest selves, their essential soul or psychologies or rationalizations in less than one thousand words, or we can find this in 500 pages, and I find this fascinating, that less can be more and more can be less, and that somewhere in between the story shows the writer a perfect length through drafts and revisions, and the mighty work of the subconscious.

What I’m really trying to say is that details, descriptions using all five senses, visuals and sounds, and smells, and the most difficult, tastes, create swaths large and small of worlds we know or have forgotten, or can only now dream up with the help of the author, mix with the unknown reader, andeverything they bring to the page, through their unknown lives, to instigate a story world that is vibrant and dangerous, and pleasurable, and perplexing—alive.

That it is the writers job to notice, often through the lens of our point of view characters, to imagine not only the world that we can sense while focusing on the blank page, but a world that teems with objects, with buildings and people, and weather, and all the minutia that conjures live around us, and make all of it seamless, and intangible, and important, and part of a background, a set, a stage, where these characters can live, can fuck up, and make discoveries, and triumph, and love and lose. And if we don’t see this world through these characters’ perspectives, then we’re not giving our readers the full advantage of the power of stories.

We recently adopted a cat from a shelter. We’ve never had a pet in our home before, and because I work from home, I spend a lot of time with this new cat, and I’m noticing things about my house that I hadn’t thought about in years, maybe ever, not since my kids were babies and then toddlers. Cats, though, can hear and see things we can’t. They are finely attuned to a world full of prey and predators, a sensory arousal that we get to take for granted most of the time. I have begun to notice things that I had become complacent about