Thursday Writing Class | Good detail is a beam of light

Song Baoying/Cartography

Author: Man Tang

Let's take an example.

There is a collection of essays that won the domestic award at the beginning of the 21st century, one of which is an essay about ancient locusts, written 20,000 or 30,000 words, with this paragraph in the middle:

"Walking into the Big Locust Tree Park built more than a decade ago, I went straight to the ancient locust site, and what I presented to me was a stele pavilion established in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Minchu, with flying cornices and arches. The five characters engraved on the stele, "Ancient Locust Tree", have frozen the bitterness, grievances, pity, misery and longing of many generations here. On the high cliff of stone building a few meters away from the site of the ancient locust is the "second generation ancient locust" born of the root of the Chinese locust, who was knocked down by a hurricane in 1974, and after people straightened her, the steel-like body still stands with an immortal soul. The life that lost the mother has long been obsessively passed on the gene to the 'three generations of locust trees', reviving the green of her death. Standing on the mother's side, the 'three generations of locust trees' have been thick and thick, and the grass is lush. She continued to pluck the strings of life, and then gave birth to a new locust, large and small, and the old locust and the new locust were in the park of the big locust tree, chanting a stubborn march of life. ”

After reading it, you may see the cultural heritage of traditional prose, which is reasonable and powerful. You may also think that this is one of the masterpieces in the pursuit of sonorous and powerful prose genres. If you look at it from the perspective of writing skills, if you feel that there is a deficiency, it is probably that there is a lack of detail in the writing, so that the passion that overflows and erupts lacks a foundation.

The communication between literature and readers is inseparable from the communication of details and telling them what they want to know.

Details are the foundation, with it or without it, the effect is really different. To use a metaphor, there are about two situations of a few fireworks during the Spring Festival, one is to stand firmly, and the fireworks rush to the sky with a black background; the other is to stand unsteadily, and the fireworks are sprayed out against the ground.

Readers for thousands of years, like today's readers, have been willing to read in detail. The details then were different from those of now.

At one end of the room, near the window, there was a black leather sofa chair, and on its side was a long oval table. By one of the walls there was a bed, a black leather chair, a huge walnut writing desk painted black, and a cabinet with many drawers. On the other side there is a bed, a black leather chair and a tiled fireplace. On the wall above the fireplace, hanging..."

This detailed passage is written by Lagerlov of Sweden, the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Next, she wrote in detail about bird specimens, hunting bags, blunt-headed swords, sabers, antlers, and so on hanging on the wall. We need to know that more than a hundred years ago, when she wrote, the car mail was slow, it was difficult to travel to distant places, and it was impossible to appreciate the world from the Internet, television, movies, and even photographic pictures, so writers needed to write out the details of the environment one by one like painters.

Whoever still writes the details like that now seems ridiculous, unless they want to get rid of the reader.

Different eras require different details. In this day and age, I look at random texts on the Internet and want to see the details: concise, necessary, well-written.

For example, the text of an interview with a scholar:

In October 2015, he sat quietly in his study, which was only six or seven square meters. At the top of the narrow bookshelf is a picture of my father and mother. They all wore gray cotton jackets, the corners of their mother's mouth were closed, and their father had a sparse goatee beard, and their eyes were indifferent and melancholy. His grandfather, who didn't leave a picture, "looked about the same as my father." ”

The last sentence in quotation marks resembles a conversation between a scholar and an interviewer. Many things were omitted before that. If you use the traditional way of writing, the paragraph of about 100 words in front of you should be at least three or five hundred words or more. For example, how to knock on the door of the scholar's house, how to be surprised by the cramped and crowded living room of his family, how to enter the narrower study and sit down for an interview, how to enter the topic from the photos on the bookshelf, first talking about the parents and relatives in the photos, and then talking about the grandparents who did not appear in the photos. Think about it, if an author doesn't have a lot of deeper things to write about, is it necessary to write about these processes?

You can see that there is something core left here, described in detail.

Savor this passage carefully.

Or take out an essay you wrote about the character earlier, and after imitating this revision, you have a general direction on how to grasp the details today.

There are many chapters that guide the writing of details, such as "The Old Man in the Station Restaurant" in "The Golden Rose". Paustowski himself wrote examples of how, in an incident in which a poor old man bought bread for a puppy, how to add the necessary details, rather than the bad ones—trivial, piled up, uncharacteristic, and nothing to explain.

He picked up the bread and went to the platform. There was no one on the platform. A storm had blown, and a second was blowing, but it was still far away, and faint sunlight could be seen in the white trees on the other side of the Riellooopy River. The old man sat down on the bench and gave Pitch a piece of bread, and wrapped the other piece in a gray handkerchief and hid it in the bag. The puppy eats convulsively... The old man looked at it and rolled his eyes with his sleeve—the wind blew down tears. ”

Paustowski's attitude is: to find and decide on the details, you need the most rigorous selection.

Strictest? What do you mean?

Details are only necessary if it is representative, only when it is able to shine like light into what you are writing (a person and his emotions, or an era and its events) from darkness.

You should pay attention to the fact that good details are not abstract, or even related to abstract words, but are directly reproduced in the reader's sense through sensible words.

In "Me and the Temple of Earth", some of the details of Stetson are exactly what he saw, heard, and smelled:

"One afternoon fifteen years ago, I entered the park in a wheelchair and it prepared everything for a soulless man. At that time, the sun was getting bigger and bigger and redder along the eternal path... The garden is full of grass and trees growing vigorously to make a noise, and it does not stop for a moment... The garden is filled with a slightly bitter smell of ironing. The taste is the most unclear. The smell can not be written but can only be smelled, you have to be immersed in the scene to smell to understand. ”

Some of his details, the things he thinks of, are tainted with subjective colors and are still perceptible:

"For example, the footprints of children in the snow in winter always make people wonder who they are, where they have done something, and then where they have gone; for example, those dark coopers, they stand there calmly when you are depressed, they still stand there calmly when you are happy, they stand there day and night from the time you were not born to the time when there is no you in this world." 」

Stetson was also good at writing details with verbs.

He uses verbs to write a series of actions, like a moving image describing the psychological emotions of the protagonist:

"Fifteen years later, I still have to go to the ancient garden, to its old trees or to the edge of the grass or to the decadent wall, to sit in silence, to think, to push away the noisy thoughts in my ears, to peek into my own soul. ...... I put the back of the chair down, lay down, as if I had not slept until the end of the day, sat up, was in a trance, and sat down straight to the ancient altar full of darkness and then gradually floated up in the moonlight, and only then did I understand a little in my heart that my mother could no longer come to this garden to find me. ”

Interestingly, with just a few quantitative words, he was able to complete his details.

"Me and the Temple of Earth" writes about a person who is always running for a long time, thinking that running a good result can change his fate:

"In the first year, he ran fifteenth place at the Spring Festival Ring Race, and he saw that the photos of the top ten were hanging in the news window of Chang'an Avenue, so he had confidence. The next year he ran fourth, but only the top three photos were hung in the news window, and he was not discouraged. In the third year, he ran to the seventh place, and the top six photos were hung in the window, and he was a little resentful of himself. In the fourth year, he ran third, but only the first place photos were hung in the window. He ran first place in the fifth year, and he was almost desperate, and there was only one picture of the crowd scene of the Tour de la Circus in the window. ”

Let's look at Stetson's characters, and there is a relatively complete passage describing two familiar strangers:

"They, like me, come to this garden almost rain or shine, but they are more punctual than I am. I could come at any time, and they must have come at the beginning of twilight. They wore beige trench coats when it was windy, black umbrellas when it rained, white shirts and black pants in the summer, and black tweed coats in the winter, presumably they only liked these three colors. They circled the garden counterclockwise and then left. When they walked past me, only the footsteps of men sounded, and the women seemed to drift along with their tall husbands. I'm sure they must have had an impression on me, but we hadn't spoken, and neither of us wanted to get close to each other. In fifteen years, they may have noticed that a young man had entered middle age, and I watched an enviable middle-aged couple unconsciously become two old people. ”

Details are just a means.

When he describes the characters, he can both notice details and jump out of details.

That is to say, a good writer can influence the details, but not the details.

Guest Editor: Dong Xueren

Source: China Youth Daily client