Posted: September 14, 2023

The Devil's in the Details

Not long ago, Ruth asked me to bring her something, I forget what. I asked if she wanted me to use our blue tray. She said we don't have a blue tray. What we have is a turquoise tray.

The details we notice from day to day are rooted in our interests, our histories, our sense of what's important in the world. Ruth grew up with the 64-crayon Crayola box. I was more the basic, eight-crayon set, so she can see colors I'm blind to. To me, puce, magenta, crimson, and terra cotta are all red. And we have a blue tray.

When you're imagining your characters to life, you've got to stay aware of just how much other people see the world differently than you do. As I've written before, it's natural to assume that you're seeing the world in the only reasonable way there is. You know what's important and what's not. It takes some humility to admit that we all have blind spots, that other people see things that we can't, or don't. Ruth's world is more colorful than mine. If I needed to create a character with Ruth's sense of color -- an artist, for instance -- I would have to learn to see the difference between scarlet and crimson, teal and robin's egg. It would be work for me, but it would make my artist a lot more plausible and interesting.

Of course, you can't be aware of all the nuances of each character's perception of the world -- novels are only so long, and there's only so much you can imagine. But if you can weave one or two main interests into each character to drive their perception of the world, your story will feel more like it's populated with real people.

You'll also be able to create more layered dramatic tension. The most interesting conflicts between characters are the ones rooted deeply in their personalities -- where readers can see both sides

So how do you develop characters who look at the world so differently? In that earlier article on getting into characters' heads, I mentioned talking to people who genuinely disagree with you and learning how they see the world, reading well-written books centered on characters who see the world in unique ways, and reading books written in the past, when people thought and worried about different things.

To that, I'd add developing new interests of your own that might expand your own sense of the world. Decades ago, just for fun, I took an introductory course in Newtonian Mechanics -- the science of forces, vectors, and acceleration. While I can't calculate the angular momentum of a hollow cylinder rolling down a hill any more (the sort of thing we did), when I'm felling a tree for firewood, I can still see where the stresses are, how the weight's distributed, envision the center of gravity, and guess how the tree will drop. Even that brief introduction to Newton changed how I see the world.

Back in the 1930's and 40's, a film producer named Henry Jamison "Jam" Handy created a series of promotional films for Chevrolet. I understand that local Chevy dealers would sponsor "Chevrolet Nights" at local theaters, where they would pay for the feature in return for having their newsreels shown. A lot of the Jam Handy films are clear explanations for the layman of the engineering behind various car components -- the differential, the transmission, the carburetor. Chevrolet assumed that the people who drove cars would have enough interest in how they worked to make the films central to their advertising.

I've sometimes felt like we've lost that sense that learning more about our world is an end in itself. But end in itself or no, seeing the world in new, deeper ways is a gift that you can pass on to your characters.