What to Include in a Story: Adding Details
By Michael Dean
As storytellers—as humans—our natural inclination is to bring order to the nebulous. We explain away why we chose a specific job, home/apartment, romantic partner, cereal at the supermarket, really anything that we deem as begging of an explanation. We spin these isolated points on our life into tidy and neat yarns that would bring a tear of admiration to the eyes of the most hardened fiber artists. We editorialize our experiences so, for if only a moment, there seems to be some grand order to it all. But how do we know which memorable trips to the supermarket to forever recount at family dinners, and which ones to let slip away?
As I delve further into creative non-fiction and personal storytelling, I have been thinking about these questions more and more: How do we decide what details to include or leave out in our stories? How do we know what is an important detail?
Oftentimes these explanations may feel spurious at the moment, and sometimes we cannot wrestle away the salient from everything else. I will have you know that I am no better than anyone else in that respect! Personally, I like starting my stories longwinded because I am afraid of losing a single detail to the dark demands of Narrative. Not just lowercase “n” narrative, but the big “N”, omniscient, omnipresent Narrative. The kind of Narrative that you will try to appease by lopping off the vestigial tidbits of your stories.
I’m going to return to cereal for a moment. Forgive me for leaning into this metaphor, but I think it spans this line between mundane and important quite well (and I just wanted to start a paragraph with that sentence).
Consider this example, expertly role-played by me (as both characters no less!). In this scenario, the storyteller is arguing with Narrative, who suggested the storyteller cut out details that seemed unimportant to the story. It goes a little like this:
“But they need to know why I chose to mention Rice Krispies,” the storyteller will beg to Narrative. “The audience has to know that a core childhood memory of mine was when I would share a bowl of the cereal with my father every Saturday morning. How I can I not talk about this memory when bringing up my father in a story. Ugh!”
Narrative will chuckle and reply, “Why do they need to know about your childhood relationship with Rice Krispies in a story about getting into a car accident in front of the state capital building?”
“Hmm” the storyteller will puzzle…
The first essay I wrote for my creative nonfiction workshop this quarter of my graduate program was a flash non-fiction essay. Flash non-fiction is a play on the “Flash Fiction” form, which traditionally means a very short story, where you do away with the more long-winded aspects of fiction prose for a concise, yet potent piece. In my essay, I chose to write about driving around and listening to music with my friends in high school, focusing on one drive in particular.
With an exercise like this, the writer must grapple with a conservative economy of words, trying to sneak in under a 750-word limit (which translates to about three pages) while still creating a compelling narrative.
In my initial drafts of the piece, I kept returning to this anecdote about why I chose to play a specific song during the car ride (Dancing Queen by ABBA). I thought it was important for the reader to know that I had chosen this song because of a previous trip I had taken to Chicago for my 17th birthday.
To make a long story short, I listened to the song to coincide with my “official” birthday (at 12:30 P.M that afternoon). I had been thinking about it on that car ride because I had just returned from another visit to Chicago for an overnight at Loyola University.
In some form like above (but in a few more words), I had gotten down this anecdote, that in my mind felt like perfect exposition for the story. Upon reviewing my draft though, I noticed three things:
1. This flashback slowed the momentum that I was building in the story, culminating in an interpolation of the song’s melody with the signs of fast-food restaurants.
2. As such, the flashback didn’t justify or prove anything that came before or after it, rather taking up some of my coveted word counts. And,
3. I was actually over the word limit.
I had become like “the storyteller” from earlier, worrisome over an important but ultimately minute detail in the broader context of my story. I couldn’t imagine how this story could stand without this detail, afraid that once I had taken away this one piece, the whole essay would topple over itself like tower Jenga blocks.
And, once I removed that tangent from my essay, it flowed so well! It felt like a lean, Vitruvian flash-nonfiction piece. I am being a bit dramatic, but I would be lying if I wasn’t happy with how it developed.
I suppose there are no concrete answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of this post. In my case, I would chalk my own intuition on where to cut down detail in my essay to some high-floating instinct, one that I am not so much capable of harnessing at will, but rather meander in and out of like a pigeon caught in a windstorm.
I do find it interesting to consider how we can self-edit our stories—our own lives—to create the most compelling version of our experience. Maybe we shouldn’t think of it as losing out on certain detail from our lives, but an opportunity to give the experience we do choose to focus on to be important for a moment.