Little and Big Detail

Springtime is my favorite season, and wildflowers are a major attraction here in beautiful western Montana.  The parade has begun, starting with buttercups in March and continuing through a roadside trio of larkspur, star flower, and biscuit root—purple, white, and yellow, a combo that would make a beautiful flag.

I’m celebrating the season by taking a class in wildflower journalling, both because I love the flowers and because I am not fundamentally a detail person.  A class like this, where I’m sketching the plants to document them, forces me to switch into the often neglected detail mode.  And I know, as a writer, that details are critical in bringing my writing to life.  Details help the reader ‘see’ what you’re writing about and can jump start a movie in the brain that will carry your reader seamlessly through your work.  This principle can be used to lead a reader through a sequence of ideas or information to a conclusion every bit as well as to carry the reader along through an exciting fiction story.

While pondering these thoughts as I climbed a trail up the mountain we live on, I noticed delicate yellow-flowered Arnica plants blooming in the dappled shade I leaned over and focused in on a single plant with my camera to document it for my wildflower project.  Further up the slope, I saw an image that epitomized Arnica’s habitat preference—an oval of tall pines created a shady spot decorated by a patch of Arnica, its borders sketched by the shade of the trees.  I suddenly realized that two kinds of detail exist, small detail and big detail.  Small detail would encompass the minute features of each plant, while big detail consisted of larger but still specific features such as the way the plants are growing in the shady patch among the pines.

When we writers wish to create images for our readers, we may move from small detail to big detail, or vice versa, depending on where we’re going with our words.  Here’s the masterful nonfiction introduction from my friend Jeanette Ingold’s Montana Book Award Honor Book novel, “The Big Burn” that moves through many small details, then widens to the big picture:

The wildfires had been burning for weeks.

They’d been born of sparks thrown from steam-driven trains and from the machinery of backcountry logging.  They’d started in the working fires of homesteaders and miners and in the campfires of hobos and in the trash-burning fires of construction camps and saloon towns.  They’d begun when lightning had coursed down from an uneasy summer sky to ignite the towering snags of dry forests.

The wildfires lay behind a brown haze that was beginning to shroud mountaintops and drift like dirty fog through the forests of the Idaho panhandle.  Though no one then knew it, they were fires that would join ranks and run in a vast wall of flame.

When they did, it would be called the big blowup, the great burn, the Big Burn.

At this point, we know we have to read on—we couldn’t stop.

  We know that detail can draw us into a piece of writing, but it can do more.  Here’s an example of how simple detail can inspire the reader’s imagination, from another award winner by a friend, Peggy Christian’s “If You Find a Rock:”

Then again,

you might find a rock

with a stripe running

all the way around it.

Trace the line

with your finger—

it must circle all the way.

you have a wishing rock,

and you whisper

what you want

before you throw it.

If you get stuck in your writing and feel you’re not drawing your readers in with your prose, think about finding a way to use a telling detail to start that inner ‘movie’ going and widen your perspective from there.  Or, if the goal is to have your readers focus on the small details, start with the big and gradually work down to the small.

Getting Involved with Learning

I’m sitting at a table in a condo in Whitefish, MT, not far from the Canadian border, on a writing retreat with two writer buddies, Peggy Christian and Jeanette Ingold. Jeanette writes YA contemporary and historical fiction (most recently “Paper Daughter”, about a Chinese American girl whose internship on a Seattle newspaper launches her into a mystery from the past) , and Peggy has written fiction for young people in the past (“The Bookstore Mouse”) and is now developing a blog (Backwoodsandbeyond.com).

At breakfast we pondered Vicki Cobb’s question for us nonfiction Ink Thinkers—what does our writing bring to the table that’s special, that makes us unique, that enriches the material we write about in a special way? As we talked, I realized that it isn’t just us nonfiction writers who uniquely help ‘educate’ our readers about the world—all good writers do the same thing, perhaps sometimes in different ways.

Historical fiction like Jeanette’s (she always aims to make sure that her information is 100% historically accurate) is a particularly obvious example—when Jeanette drops her characters down into a real situation, such as the terrible firestorm that engulfed the mountain west in 1910, in her book, “The Big Burn,” readers come away with an understanding of this event that’s seared into their memories. The characters may be made-up people, but their experiences of the fire are those of real people who went through that terrible time.

What does my nonfiction book, “Fire: Friend or Foe,” give readers that they couldn’t glean from Jeanette’s story? My work may cover some of the same territory, but it offers a broader view of the role of fire in the world. I can step back from a story like the 1910 fires to provide a greater context for that event, and I can help explain the various factors involved when wildfires rage, as well as provide a modern perspective on that fire’s role in shaping America’s attitudes and policies during the 20^th century and into the 21^st.

Perhaps historical fiction offers a way for readers to become more personally involved in a topic they are learning about. In a way, they are participating in the event, and personal involvement helps integrate information into our brains. A student might read “The Big Burn” and become intensely curious about wildfire, then turn to “Fire: Friend or Foe” for more information. It’s great the way fiction and nonfiction can complement each other.

As we discussed this issue, Peggy commented that when their family lived in New Zealand for three years, her sons were taught science totally experientially. For example, teams of fourth grade students were challenged to figure out how to build a raft that would hold the weight of a student crossing the swimming pool from just two long sticks, some garbage bags, and tape. The early designs failed, resulting in lots of dripping wet students, but eventually, the children realized that if they broke the sticks and used the pieces to make a sturdy triangle support for the plastic, the raft would succeed. What better way to show how triangular shapes impart strength and stability?

The members of Authors on Call, the part of Ink Think Tank that consults with teachers via videoconferencing, are partnering with teachers at Bogert School in New Jersey to integrate experiential learning into the curriculum using our books as tools for discovery. In the process, fifth graders created videos demonstrating geological phenomena and in the process came to understand our restless earth in a way they otherwise wouldn’t have; fourth graders created their own book about government that brims with creative touches such as characters speaking their ideas in cartoonlike balloons, which helps emphasize the most important information; and third grade students have exclaimed with wonder about our fascinating solar system by going to the NASA website online to discover information for themselves, rather than just reading facts from a textbook. And that’s just results from the first three author/teacher/student partnerships so far completed. There's more to come!