Trust the Detail
Sometimes insight arrives suddenly and sometimes it grows over the course of years. This post reflects the slower variety of revelation.
The Importance of Paying Attention to Details
Verlyn Klinkenborg opens his book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, with this advice:
Here, in short is what I want to tell you. Know what each sentence says, what it doesn’t say, and what it implies. Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says (3).
I’m teaching a first-year college composition course this quarter. One of the pieces of feedback I find myself repeatedly giving is this: Go back to the text. What is the author actually saying? It’s easy to read a piece once and assume your memory of it, your summary of it, is just fine. But upon a second reading, it is often the case that new details stand out, surprising and correcting our memory.
I also tell my students: Bring in more material from your source texts. Your summary is good, but there are so many details from this text that would enrich your argument. Don’t just respond to the author’s ideas on a big, broad, universal level. Respond to the details of their argument. How is their argument different from broad slogans and clichés, like “Save the Earth” or “reconnect with nature.”
Arguments are always more interesting when details are included and explored. Big ideas are just airy propositions until they have flesh and bones and a place in the real, day-to-day world.
It has taken me until this year to realize the importance of details. I have always believed that big ideas required discussions in abstract terms: “Justice is love and righteousness peacefully reconciling.” That may sound nice or clever or intelligent, but in reality it is just a clanging cymbal, an empty sound. Give me a story, give me the details of the relationship between people, their history, their buttons, their hopes and habits, their sense of place in the world. Only then will I be able to glimpse any truth of justice, love, righteousness, peace, reconciliation.
Here’s the paradox: In order to connect with others, I need to trust more in details and less on universals. I might think that the “common ground” between me and my readers consists of abstract beliefs in love and truth, and I might say some clever things about those ideas. Readers might resonate with those clever things I write. But in the end, those clever things are vague abstractions.
By writing my own experiences—through details specific to my life and location—I actually provide more opportunities for connection with the reader.
Stephen Dobyns, in Best Words, Best Order, writes:
The work belongs to the reader. Its hidden subject is the life of the reader. It is through structure that the writer moves the work from his or her life to the reader’s life, that the metaphor is moved from the quirky specificity of the writer’s life to the greater universality of the reader’s life (52).
Details enrich the writing and reading experience and ground any abstract, universal claims we want to make. Maybe this is common sense to most people. To me, it is only a recently unfolding revelation.
Details and Poetry
I started my MFA program in 2018. In my first mentor meeting, the first thing my mentor said about my writing was: “Now, the problem with your poems is….”
This may seem rather blunt, but I actually laughed. That was exactly the feedback I needed. It wasn’t about the poems per se, but about understanding my tendencies as a writer: to explain, to overexplain.
That explanation came at the level of abstract ideas. I had many ideas I wanted to express in my poems. Amid the images, I would include an abstract and profound—if I do say so myself—statement. But this meant the poem was fixed from the beginning. I had to find details to match my abstract ideas.
Instead, I was encouraged to: Write more images. End your poem with an image rather than a profound statement. Trust your reader to find the “message” in the images and metaphors you use. You don’t need to explain everything to them. Explore the details of an experience or object or other text and see what “ideas” emerge from them, rather than working the other way round.
Details and the Writing Life
Some quotes from Patricia Hampl, from The Art of the Wasted Day:
When I read Speak, Memory, and later read Nabokov’s command—Caress the detail, the divine detail—I knew I had found the motto I could live by, the one that prevailed over “show, don’t tell” (180).
In attending to the details, in the act of description, the more dynamic aspects of narrative have a chance to reveal themselves—not as “action” or “conflict” or any of the theoretical terms we persist in thinking of as the sources of form. Rather, description gives the mind a place to be in relation with the reality of the world (181).
I went home and looked at a teacup on the table—wrote that too. Still-life descriptions that ran on for several pages. I wrote and wrote, describing my way through art galleries and the inadvertent still lifes of my house and my memory, my grandmother’s garden, her Sunday dinners. ¶ To my growing astonishment, these descriptive passages, sometimes running two, three pages, even longer, had a way of shearing off into narrative after all. The teacup had been given to me by my mother. And once I thought of the fact she had bought these cups, made in Czechoslovakia, as a bride just before the Second World War, I was writing about that war, about my mother and her later disappointments, which somehow were—and were not—part of this fragile cup. Description, which had seemed like background in novels, static and inert as a butterfly pinned to the page of my notebook, proved to be a dynamic engine that stoked voice and, even more, propelled the occasional narrative arc. ¶ Written from the personal voice of my own perception, description proved even to be the link with the world’s story, with history itself. Here was my mother’s teacup, made in Czechoslovakia before the war, and here, therefore, was not only my mother’s heartbreak, but Europe’s. The detail was surely divine, offering up miracles of connections out of the faithful consideration of the fragments before me (182–183).
The history of whole countries, of an entire era and even lost populations, depends sometimes on a little girl faithfully keeping her diary. The great contract of literature consists in this: you tell me your story and somehow I get my story. If we are looking for another reason to explain the strangely powerful grip of the first-person voice on contemporary writing, perhaps we need to look no further than the power of Anne Frank’s equation: that to write one’s life enables the world to preserve and, more, to comprehend its history (183–184).
The Revelation
The detail is the standard unit of meaning. The detail is the building block of significance. The detail is the site of connection and compassion.
Large, pressing, controversial issues are often described and debated at the level of summary. Abstract ideas and “universal” truths become a trade language between people on opposing sides of an argument. This supposed “common ground” may seem a necessary place to meet those with whom we disagree.
But if you and I debate about a topic and keep to the abstractions, the assumptions, the stereotypes, I can keep my distance from you as a person. I can treat you like a “them.” And in this mode, I can begin to erase your particular identity, replacing it with an abstract category, one that justifies my own thinking and insulates me from challenge. You are wrong, you are inferior, you are worthy of my distrust and disgust.
This kind of abstraction can infect our narratives, leading us to think more highly of ourselves and less of outsiders. It can lead to oppression and violence. Ta-Nehisi Coates calls this “the sin of abstraction.” Our opponents, our enemies become nameless, faceless, lifeless abstractions, and we justify our harm against them.
When I hear the details of your life, however, when I realize that those details connect somehow to my own life, then you become less of a “them” and perhaps begin to move into my circle of “us.” Then the debate becomes less about who can articulate their ideas better, and more about how the issues affect our day-to-day lives.
William Stafford writes of this possibility in his poem, “For the Unknown Enemy.”
This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.
Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.
This monument is for you.
We may find common ground in generalized statements, but our common humanity is found in the details of our lives. We encounter our common humanity when we share and listen to the details of our struggles, our hopes, our joys. Our struggles, hopes, and joys may be different (details) but they manifest a common human experience (universals).
More details provide more opportunity for connection and compassion. Start with details. From there, we can better understand the abstract concepts we discuss.
We might also be wedded to an abstract sense of “goodwill” toward other people that does not prepare us adequately to love people in particular.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, the aging monk Father Zossima converses with Madam Hohlakov about “love in action.” He shares a story of a doctor he once knew who said, “I love humanity. … The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. … It has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.” Later, Father Zossima tells Madam Hohlakov that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Romantic ideas of ourselves or others can distort our view of reality just like harmful abstractions can. It is by confronting reality, in the richness and messiness of its details, that we can remove our faulty lenses and be transformed. But the challenge is in admitting our abstractions are problematic.
An Application
I’m reading Ta-Nahisi Coates’ latest book, The Message. Following in the tradition of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” Coates explores how all language is political, how it shapes perspective, and how it can be used to support human dignity and life or destroy it. Addressing his writing students, he says,
All of our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. For you there can be no real difference between writing and politics (4).
The “small and particular” can sometimes seem disconnected from one’s more abstract political beliefs. But the details of our daily lives demonstrate what we truly believe, sometimes—often, perhaps—at odds with our stated convictions.
Coates goes on to compare the writing process to cartography. He imagines “a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest” (16). A cartographer cannot merely stand at the edge, imagining what the forest looks like. “You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil” (17). In other words, it is not enough to have an abstract idea of the shape of the forest. In order to know the forest, you have to explore it in detail.
Experiencing things more directly and in detail can create dissonance. Details reshape the summaries and categories and abstract ideas we have in our heads. When Coates visits Dakar, Senegal, he feels this dissonance, and encourages the reader to understand how complex it is:
This is about the forest again—about the limits of genius, about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge. There are dimensions in your words—rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve—the potholes, the dented fenders, the fried bread, the walls of fabric, the heaping plate of rice and fish. But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness—in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself. My own surprise at, say, Africans jogging on the beach or a dilapidated gym revealing itself as a beautiful example of civic spirit says something important about the world I was trying to describe but also about me, my fears, and my doubts (44–45).
The Senegal that Coates had imagined—shaped by both his Black ancestral heritage and the white supremacist ideologies that permeate the Western worldview—was confronted by the reality he experienced once he was there. The imagined place was abstract; the real world details challenged his assumptions.
By writing about his experience, Coates models how the “accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life” can give “angle, color, and curve” to one’s understanding. When you write about your life, it’s not just the details that matter, but the intersection between the details of the “outer” world and the details of your interior life. This is where meaning happens—not a fixed meaning with only one interpretive possibility, but a provisional meaning, one that can go on to further intersect with the life of the reader.
Writing is a way to make the abstract more concrete. I have no problem sifting and generating ideas in my head, but they are often amorphous, loosely (and often energetically) connected to other ideas. It is when I actually write that the struggle—and the joy—of translating the abstract to the detailed takes place. Writing is “a form that must make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt,” says Coates (70).
This has been a bit of a meander. A stroll through a forest, if you will. Here is what I’ll leave you with: Details can do more than what you might expect. Trust them. Details can connect us with others more readily than abstract ideas. Details can foster compassion, helping us to overcome our generalized assumptions. Details can lead you to deeper, more meaningful insight than a vague “universal” idea can. Trust the detail, the divine detail.