by Patricia Weaver Francisco

My mother and my brother had a running battle about the existence of what she called “true facts,” a species fundamentally different from its less glamorous, less noteworthy cousin, the fact. A true fact is a slippery character, she was first to admit, but she knew one when she saw it. My brother countered that a fact is a fact is a fact because a fact is simply true. A true fact makes no more sense than a near miss, he’d say, calmly claiming victory. Ah, my mother would smile, my point exactly. A miss and a near miss are entirely different matters . . .

Though I didn’t take sides in this linguistic duel, my mother had it right. True facts, she argued, are those that matter, those that harbor wisdom or enlarge our sense of possibility. True facts, I realize all these years later, are kissing cousins to what I call “original details” in writing. Original details are the first hint that we’ve entered a piece of writing that matters. They help create the elusive element we call voice and are the one true fact I know about good writing.

As the 2010–2011 Loft Mentor Series creative nonfiction mentor, I turned to the notion of the original detail as I prepared to conduct workshops for the winning writers. What could I offer that would be useful to poets and prose writers alike? To these fine and accomplished writers?

Original detail is a term I’m quite certain I stole from Natalie Goldberg’s book of enduring delight and wisdom, Writing Down the Bones. But over the years, the term has accumulated layers of meaning for me, grown into a personal manifesto that grounds my teaching and my own writing: Truth begins in the detail and radiates into form and vision. Originality begins in the detail and is experienced as voice. It all begins in recognizing that accuracy means subjectivity.

Why? Choreographer Martha Graham said it best: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any medium, and be lost. The world will not have it.”

There it is. When you communicate what you alone can see (for there will never be another you), in the way that you alone can express it, you offer a grateful world something rare. We crave this admittance into the inner landscape of the other in our relationships, and we are drawn to it in art. But this is a demanding discipline. It requires a rigorous honesty and courage.

The alternative to original detail is received wisdom, the blurry sum total of everything we’ve absorbed about the world as it’s said to be. Clichés and stereotypes are only the beginning of the infiltration of received wisdom into our language and our thinking. It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity. All she could think about was the way he looked the night before, like a lost soul. His heart pounded in his chest, and he gasped for breath. True enough, and not an original detail in the bunch.

Received wisdom is the stuff of many a first draft roughed in before the presenting dream fades from view. But the art of description, of either an internal or external truth, requires the writer to separate received wisdom from authentic perception, however embarrassing, inexplicable, or plain. The writer must also separate familiar, lazy language from the expression that belongs to one’s oddball self: our private storehouse of language made of memory, association, reference, and the music of the places, people, and writers we each hear most dearly. Hard work. But precise observation and idiosyncratic expression in the details eventually become voice, style, and vision.

I grew up in a modest first-ring suburb of Detroit, and soon after arriving in Minnesota, I observed that one of the greatest goods of the Good Life in Minnesota was a cabin, preferably on a lake. We were young and broke and without connections, so we watched as friends disappeared for long weekends, braving family dynamics, taking a chance on random coworkers, anything for time at a cabin. Finally our day came, and we spent our first weekend at a small lake in Wisconsin. Time passed. Slowly. Bats were involved. And ticks. Also the eerie country silence I’ve since come to associate with deep peace, but which my city ears read as the sound of yawning boredom and looming, shapeless danger.

Had I been asked to write honestly about my first experience with “cabin on lake,” I would have had to say boring and terrifying. I was spared that assignment, and happily so, for it would have presented me with the second obstacle to writing with original detail. When you tell a most particular truth, it separates you from the group. By definition. Rather than risk offending one’s hosts and all those who cherish time at cabins, might it not be easier to get on board with what everyone else seems to think, learn a form of clever ventriloquism, pull out some received wisdom and polish it up as a gift?

Yes, it might be easier, but then no one ever said you had to write in the first place.

Why take up your time and ours if not to press hard against opaqueness and illusion to see what is, as only you can put it across? This is the work we require of art: to transform the world by showing it anew. The reward is that these difficult details, the ones that seem most alienating because they seem to have occurred to you and only you, these true facts are what bring the world to your door. Gratitude is the common response. We are more alike than we acknowledge, for all that is gloriously various in our capacities for wonder. Your vision might match something for which until now I’ve had no words, no image, no vessel to contain it. Or it may be so outside my experience as to actually enlarge the possibilities of existence.

Nevertheless, original details do not announce themselves by their strangeness or showy dress. They simply strike us as true. In Writing with Power, Peter Elbow gives this simple example: “What often happens is that a student describes something, perhaps a maple tree on the front lawn with flowers growing around the trunk. But that doesn’t make me see it.” He urges the student to close her eyes, to work to call back the actual details. “The tree isn’t in the middle of the lawn. It’s really near the sidewalk. And it doesn’t have flowers growing around it, it has long strands of scraggly grass that the lawnmower didn’t quite get.” Now we’re in the territory of the original detail. We know this tree. We can see it, and it delights us.

Not all original details draw their power from the precision of the description. Here’s John Cheever from “The Lowboy,” writing in generalities so firmly rooted in an individual perception that they become original detail. “We sat under a big maple. Its leaves not fully formed but formed enough to hold the light, and it was astounding in its beauty, and seemed not like a single tree but one of a million, a link in a long train of leafy trees beginning in childhood.”

When I brought this true fact about good writing to this year’s winners of the Loft Mentor Series, they listened politely and took notes. But here’s the unsurprising surprise: they were already in on the secret. In gratitude to the lovely human beings and clear-eyed writers I got to know this year in the Mentor Series, let me close with an anthology of original details from their work.

Amelia Boulware: “A steeple of green blocked the sun. Balloons tied to a sapling in the front yard looked like boxing gloves swiping at each other.”

Kimberly Brown: “We vibrate helter-skelter, my hands fly up, in my small private space, to hold on. The ground, the road, beneath me coughs—a quiver, a rumble, nauseous. It’s the dynamite before it blows.”

Betsy Daub: “Folds of wetness / prickled my face, / anointed the polished bedrock / where buffalo once eased their itch, / hung their glitter / on pink elfin threads of prairie smoke.”

Anna Henderson: “The trees are big and dopey looking with weepy branches of green rain. I do not see the cave. I try to remember what Jesus-Tree said—had I gone too far?”

Amber Larson: “The car’s tires are low and gummy from the heat and make a clicking sound against the gravel and I think the concrete must be getting stuck in the rubber like quarters in the tar.”

Katie Leo: “There are many things I’ll never know. The essential lives of geldings, for example. Houseplants as a sign of spiritual intelligence. The approximate angle at which sunlight disappears on a knife’s edge. Deaths of stars just beyond our galaxy.”

Ben Paulus: “I believe in Papermate Mirado Black Warrior F 2.5 cedar woodcase pencils with straight wood grain and black matte barrels. I believe in the twin helix blades of the Boston KS wall-mount rotary sharpener, in the unused dial for pencils of nonstandard heft. I believe in the huk, huk, huk of the grind, the rising friction of cedar and stone, the blow on the lethal point to clear the clung specks, the smoke.“

Michael Schurter: “And all around the big man, the man with the king’s presence, a second force, like a miggie or a gnat, another man, a smaller man, also black, elf-like, manic, large glasses, floppy hat, and an alarm clock whose background was the pan-African flag hanging and dancing around his neck on a thick gold chain. . . .”

Christine Stark: “My breath created a thin layer of ice in the shape of my mouth on the scarf. The heavy coat made me feel like an astronaut. I watched her, waving the newspaper at me. I said nothing. Then I turned away from her, and trudged up the street, passing Amy’s Café, its warmth and light and food unaffordable to me.”

Lee Colin Thomas: “My clumsy ears hear only / hammer on wood, but not / into the hammer, into the wood. / My fingers are too thick / to caress the texture of light.”

Natalie Vestin: “Our fields are made of metals, layered plate upon plate, and the cold steals across and enters these expanses like ice water on a carious tooth.”

Carolyn Williams-Noren: “We remember the weight / of them napping on our chests, their / humid breath, and it’s like holding / robin’s eggs in our mouths. Our tongues / tremble, trying not to crush them.”

 

Patricia Weaver Francisco is the author of three books, most recently Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery, which received the Minnesota Book Award.  This past year she served as creative nonfiction mentor in The Loft Mentor Series. She teaches in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University.