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?

Truth is in the details

 The truth is in the details. - Stephen King

The Year of Billy Miller by Kevin Henkes (Greenwillow, 2013) is the kind of book that pulls you into the story with the truth of its details. 

Each detail is so precise and reveals the truth of each character in a way that helps illuminate our understanding of where the character is, emotionally, in each moment.

The plot is almost nonexistent: Billy is entering second grade, bumps his head in a fall before the story starts, and worries he won't be smart enough for second grade. 

And through a series of small incidents he gains the insight into himself to realize he is smart. 

But the thin plot hardly matters because the details are so utterly perfect and contribute to the magic of this story, which relies on Henkes' ability to capture the sensibility of a second grader's world--both emotionally and physically--and to depict that world so beautifully on the page.

Henkes gives us details like these when he describes Billy's first encounter with his second grade teacher Ms. Silver:

Ms. Silver had chopsticks in her hair. That was the first thing Billy noticed about her. Her wavy blond hair was coiled into a bun and held in place with two shiny red chopsticks. Billy's parents like to eat with chopsticks sometimes, but he had never seen chopsticks on someone's head before.

And details like these when Billy notices the changing seasons (and the changing emotions that his father displays):

Things were changing. The light was different. The trees throughout the neighborhood were turning. Every day it seemed the leaves were more colorful, as if someone had taken a paintbrush to them during the night. There was a cool edge in the air and, lately, an edge to Papa, too.

And like these details after Billy shares an idea with his father that might help Papa with his work:

Papa leaned toward Billy and pecked the top of his head. He rose from the bed. As he walked away, his big adult frame darkened the doorway. And then he was gone. But Billy could hear him humming. The sound was low and rumbly. Simple and tuneful. Not quite happy. But definitely not crabby.

How do such details work? 

They work, I suspect, for a number of reasons:

First, Henkes manages to convey a convincing picture of a second grader's way of thinking about the world. He reveals Billy's thought process, using words that are so exact and precise that the words themselves feel almost like visible threads of Billy's thoughts that appear on the page. 

Second, the details offer a glimpse into how Billy views the world. They tell us not only what he sees and thinks, but what he feels. The light was different, changing. Leaves were more colorful. The days were cooler. And then Henkes offers us an emotional link to Billy and his sense that Papa is changing too, being crabby when he's ordinarily good humored. 

Third, Henkes has a gift for finding the right word and knowing how to place it in the right place. He doesn't say Papa kissed the top of Billy's head. He says he pecked Billy's head. He doesn't say his frame filled the doorway, but rather, with much more precision and attention to details (aware of how the scene might appear to Billy), he writes his big adult frame darkened the doorway. 

Henkes uses details to convey elements of surprise, as well, and to alert us to Billy's discoveries of new ways of seeing the world. For example, Henkes shows us how Billy views the chopsticks in his teacher's hair not just as tools with which to eat, and not just as any chopsticks but as two shiny red chopsticks. And he shows us not just Ms. Silver's hair but her wavy blond hair, coiled into a bun and held in place with two shiny red chopsticks.

Thanks to Henkes' careful selection of details, he's able to give the reader an insider's view of Billy's perspective and thought-process. Such details accurately depict what Billy sees, thinks, and feels. 

And by conveying Billy's responses to events in the story on three different levels--showing us what he sees, thinks, and feels--Henkes offers each reader the opportunity to feel as if he or she is discovering the truth with Billy on every page.

If you write with the same kind of close and careful attention to detail as Henkes, and strive to understand, as Stephen King reminds us, that the truth is in the details, then you will be able to draw your reader into your story, too.

For information about Kevin Henkes and his work, visit his website: https://kevinhenkes.com

And for more information about using details in your writing, visit: 

https://alanrinzler.com/2012/05/its-the-details-writers/

https://www.writersdigest.com/there-are-no-rules/importance-small-details-fiction-writing

https://theeditorsblog.net/2010/11/23/detail-enhances-your-fiction/

https://penandthepad.com/write-details-story-7706522.html

https://wac.colostate.edu/resources/writing/guides/detail/

Becoming Mindful of Details

Sometimes I’ll take a book off my shelf and find a passage at random and study the words that the writer decided to place on the page.

It’s a helpful strategy, I think, for becoming more mindful of the power of words and for learning how a writer makes choices to create an image on the page, set up a scene, and evoke an emotional response in his or her reader.

Here’s a passage from Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian, a remarkable book about the Armenian genocide, which was a National Book Award Finalist in 2000: 

When the sun barely touched the tops of the trees, we were led off the road to a flat place by the River Tigris. It was the same river Sisak and Oskina and I had swum in the year before, and now it was congested with thousands of corpses. They were floating faceup, facedown, naked and clothed, the rust-colored water washing over and around them.” (p. 47)

That’s the way the words appear on the page, and the images are clear—so clear and powerful that you can almost smell the corpses in the river—the details drawing you into the scene.

Now let’s imagine how the words might have appeared in an earlier draft, one where the heightened level of specificity hadn’t yet made its way to the page.

Remember, this is not Bagdasarian’s draft; it’s my way of imagining how he might have written an earlier draft: 

When the sun touched the trees, we were led off the road to the river. It was the river that I had swum in the year before. Thousands of corpses were floating in the water.

Do you see the difference and how the specificity of the words in the final draft help to create the image that you see in your imagination?

We can go even further back, if we want, to an even earlier (imaginary) version: 

The sun touched the trees. We were led to the river. Corpses floated in the water.

That’s the basic structure of the paragraph, the spine on which the images and emotions are built and layered.

Sun touches trees.

People, including the narrator, are led to a river.

He sees corpses in the water.

Now try going through the passage sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word, to see how the author built this paragraph, crafting it so beautifully (and tragically) to reveal the chaos and sense of life being ripped apart.

Notice how Bagdasarian draws your attention to the sunlight on the trees to frame the image at the break of day, not just sunlight on trees but more precisely light that “barely touched the tops of the trees.”

You can see how he was “led off the road” not just to the river itself but to a “flat place by the River Tigris.” Not just any place. A flat place. And not just any river. The Tigris River.

And you can begin to understand how he creates a sense of time’s passage, as well as a sense of all that’s been lost since the year before when he swam in the river with his friends, by contrasting the memory of what was with the grief-stricken sight of what is there now.

And, last and perhaps most tragically, you can see the corpses floating in the water, and, more urgently, you can see the “rust-colored water washing over and around them.” Not just over them, but over and around them.

If you expect your readers to trust you, to follow you into the imaginary world that you create for them, it’s essential that you become mindful of the details that will draw them into the your story.

For more information on becoming mindful of the details, visit:

http://theeditorsblog.net/2010/11/23/detail-enhances-your-fiction/

http://wordplay-kmweiland.blogspot.com/2009/07/details-bringing-fiction-to-life.html

http://conniehamptonconnally.com/writing-historical-fiction-the-challenge-of-vivid-details/

http://www.deniserobbins.com/articles_description_in_fiction.html