On Making Things Real

Or, on how it's all in the most specific of details

Much of my manuscript read-through has been done alongside a sleeping puppy.

This last week, I've been reading through the first draft of the novel I've been working on since the spring. Generally speaking, I'm pleased with what I've found there. But – as it always is for me – this exercise has really been about scribbling all over a printed manuscript, trying to note down all the ways it needs to be more. More layered, more complex, more atmospheric, more readable, more compulsive. And, most importantly, more real.

Is there a magic formula that has to be invoked to make a story come to life? It's a good question, and I'm certainly not qualified to give more than a cursory answer. If I were to have a go, I'd venture that us authors need to build in a certain amount of depth before things can become three-dimensional. After all, stories need to have movement and life and conflicting emotion. I'd also argue that they need to contain the sort of detail that makes the real world keep spinning around us.

In my own experience, first drafts don't contain the right sort of detail. Rather, everything feels a little blurry, a little generic. I don't yet know my characters well enough to be able to see exactly how they might react in any given situation. I don't know what little things they might notice when they look around the space I've dropped them into. I don't know what they might seek out and what they might not.

Thankfully, by the time I get around to subsequent drafts, all these things have become a little clearer. I try to find and weed out the generic descriptions that found their way into the early versions of the story and replace them with more specific ones. I try to ensure that these details have meaning: mainly meaning for the character, but also meaning for me.

Thirteen years ago, I did a Creative Writing MA in Manchester during the singular year that Colm Toíbín taught on the course. I consider this a strike of luck, because a lot of what I now understand about the vital role little details have in making a novel feel real is underscored by little sparks of inspiration taught by Colm Toíbín himself. It's funny, the things that stay with you. I remember Colm once speaking about how he didn't chose even inconsequential details at random. If he needed a house number, a date, a street name, he'd choose something that had some kind of personal resonance to him. This wouldn't need to be explained or alluded to in the text: he felt that the fact of a number/name/date/place having some meaning for the author would somehow imbue that significance into the text and translate into a kind of echoed resonance to the reader.

I don't know if this is true. Can I tell when an author writes about number twenty-nine Something Street that they once lived at a number twenty-nine themselves? Probably not. And yet, I've still done this in my own work ever since. I namedrop snatches of childhood addresses, the birthdays of loved ones, significant locations. I do it because it helps to give the text a shining sort of meaning for me. And when my writing develops that sheen, I hope that means it's getting closer to glowing for everyone else, too.

The specificity of details also helps to build character. All of us make our own distinct set of choices for our own distinct set of reasons. What we name our children or our cats or our homes is part of who we are, as are our hobbies and our meal choices and our favourite place to stroll on a sunny afternoon. All these things matter, and when we’re writing, all these things need to be true to our characters, too. Indeed: sometimes when I add a character detail I’m particularly proud of, I can still hear Colm Toíbín exclaim yes! They WOULD do that! (I think it's probably a sign of an inspiring teacher if more than a dozen years later you can still hear their gleeful voice in your head.¹)

So, when I go through a printed manuscript with my pen and my highlighter, these are the kind of wonderfully specific details that I’d like to be sprinkling in. Whether I scribble down this needs more drama, or add different detail here, or this needs to be more complex, or SDT!! (translation: show don't tell), I'm really telling myself the same thing over and over again. And that thing is simply this: that my job now is to add the type of specific, layered detail that will make the story come alive.

1. Perhaps there’s some truth to the idea that something that has meaning for the author can somehow radiate through to the reader. Certainly, when I pick up a Colm Toíbín novel and read one of the wonderful little character details he's so brilliant at, I swear I can actually feel just how pleased he was with himself when he came up with it.