Details fascinate me. I love to pile up details. They create an atmosphere. MURIEL SPARK
Details create atmosphere – no doubt about it. Whether you’re writing about the past or the present, whether you’re writing a whodunit or a romcom, detail is how you can create an atmosphere and bring the time and the place you’re writing about to life. Let’s look at a few well-known examples. In Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel excels at the small, telling detail. We can almost smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp fibres of rushes under our feet. Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring gives us a feeling of real authenticity, with its fascinating domestic details of daily life in Delft in the 17th century, plus lots of technical detail about the process of painting and the way Vermeer prepared his paint. In Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels the detail of his Dorset landscape is described with a naturalist’s eye. Ian
Rankin’s Rebus novels give us an authentic feel for the sights and sounds and smells of the non-touristy parts of Edinburgh, with their down-at-heel pubs and their graffiti-ridden housing estates. In Bridget Jones’s Diary Helen Fielding lists Bridget’s New Year’s resolutions, giving us enough detail to make us pretty sure that she won’t keep any of them (‘drink no more than fourteen units of alcohol a week; reduce circumference of thighs by 3 inches’). These are widely different writers, writing in many different genres, but in each case the specific detail enables us to build up an authentic picture of the scene. It goes without saying that the detail must be 100% accurate. If you’re writing about the past, do your research. If you get it wrong, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone, somewhere will pick it up and let you know about it. And if one little detail is shown to be wrong, your readers may question the authenticity of everything else.
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January 2018
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