Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude - the appearance of being true or real, as in "the detail gives the novel some verisimilitude" (definition from Oxford Languages)

Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading Robert Parker's detective series, and the more I read the stories that Parker has written about Spenser, the more impressed I am with the amount of details that he includes in the stories.

All of these details give the narrative its texture and its uncanny resemblance to reality. 

Wall colors, cracks in sidewalks, the contents of a room--these kinds of details give a reader confidence in an author's ability to see the world with accuracy and let the reader trust him as a narrator.

Here are three examples from A Savage Place, the Parker novel that I'm reading now:

1) The office was on the first floor and had a little bay window framed with gray drapes that looked out onto Sunset and people on the sidewalk. There were several autographed pictures of actors on the wall and a bookcase liquor-cabinet-stereo set up along one side of the room. Besides a desk with two phones there were two more of the leather-and-wood sitting room chairs. Zeke was behind his desk, we sat in the chairs. The walls were pale gray, the rug was charcoal.

2) We went to The Palm on Santa Monica. The walls were covered with clumsy murals of show-biz celebrities in caricature. But my plate was covered with medium-rare butterflied lamb chops and asparagus with hollandaise.

3) Oceania Industries had executive offices high up in one of the towers. The waiting room had large oil paintings of Oceania's various enterprises: oil rigs, something that I took for a gypsum mine, a scene from a recent Summit picture, a long stand of huge pines. On the end tables were copies of the annual report and the several house organs from the various divisions. They had titles like Gypsum Jottings and Timber Talk.

There was no one in the reception room except a woman at a huge semicircular reception desk. Her fingernails were painted silver. She looked like Nina Foch. 

Unlike the newspaper editor, who told me years ago when I was starting out as a reporter not to report on the color of the walls in the borough hall, Parker would have told me just the opposite. 

Give your reader the color of the walls, the arrangement of furniture, the number of windows, the way the paint has been brushed on the ceiling, the type of soda machines in the lobby, the number of stairs to the second floor, the wood used to make the doors to the offices, the signs on the doors. 

Parker's eye is like a vacuum cleaner. He inhales these kinds of details so his pen can put them on the page. He sees everything. 

So, how can you practice "seeing" this way? 

What if you keep a notebook with you wherever you go and write down what you see, say, the next time you are at the train station or in the supermarket or sitting at church or walking your dog in the park? 

What is the color of the walls? How many windows are there in the room? How would you describe the shape of a roof? What kind of benches are in the park?

Try it. What have you got to lose? 

See if adding these kinds of details to your story can help give your narrative a greater sense of verisimilitude, heightening your reader's sense of reality and his or her trust in you as a narrator. 

And if you're willing to share some of your favorite details from a book that you're reading now, perhaps you'll leave them in the comments for us to study, too?