In Today’s Journal
* I Just Realized
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
I Just Realized
This could be titled “Write What You Want Them to See.”
I was in the Marine Corps for 21 years. I’ve been out for 34 years.
Just so you know, I don’t say that because I need or want to be thanked for my service. I honestly don’t.
For one thing, the Eagle thanked me every two weeks with a paycheck. For another, shrug, everybody’s gotta be somewhere doing something, am I right?
I only bring up that total of 43 years because yesterday I finally realized why I get so annoyed at and frustrated with purveyors of the soup sandwich.
You know the ones I mean. Slop it together and it’ll work. Or not. And if it doesn’t, we’ll slop it together again later. No biggie.
Gaaaaa. That kind of thinking makes my head want to explode.
Still, that’s fine in life (I guess), but when you write fiction it’s a sure ticket to a shallow, uninteresting story and inattentive readers.
As an example, I remember several years ago advising writers in a live seminar to never write “It caught my eye” unless “it” was something that physically caught the character’s eye. That would probably hurt like hell, wouldn’t it? I suspect my exact advice was “Unless something physically catches the character’s eye, write ‘It caught my attention’.”
One writer in that seminar shook her head and wagged a hand. “The reader will know what I mean.”
Hyuck, hyuck. Yeah, that’s good, lady. Put your ignorance on display for everyone to see.
In lieu of my head exploding, I offered a tight-lipped smile. “But it isn’t the reader’s responsibility to figure out what you meant. It’s your responsibility to write what you mean so the reader has no chance to misinterpret your meaning.”
I still believe that’s true, of course, but at long last I know why I understand that and so many others pooh-pooh it as just another silly, unimportant detail.
It all comes down to the importance, or lack thereof, of attention to detail.
I’ve seemingly been detail oriented all my life. But again, I only finally realized yesterday why I’m that way when I happened to catch a ‘reel’ on Facebook.
In that reel, the current commandant of the Marine Corps was explaining to an auditorium full of jarheads why the Corps requires medal ribbons to be aligned exactly one-eighth of an inch above the left breast pocket of the dress shirt or uniform jacket.
At first he only shrugged. “We made it up.” (grin) Then he explained. “But we made it up to focus your attention on detail. Because details matter. When you’re in combat and the guy who knows says your magnetic heading has to be 175 degrees, it’s important. Why? Because 174.5 or 175.3 might get you killed.”
And he was right. A bullet loading into the chamber of a machine gun “close enough” isn’t close enough. It could cause the gun to explode.
Of course, I understand that what we do as writers isn’t life or death.
Well, it isn’t literally life or death.
But your level of craft—your attention to detail—could easily mean the success or failure of your story or even the life or death of your career as a fiction writer.
But all of that’s beyond the point.
Frankly, I’m completely stymied as to why any writer wouldn’t want to convey the exact scene he’s seeing in his head as the story unfolds. Why is any fiction writer willing to leave something so important to chance?
I mean, we inadvertently leave a lot of things to chance anyway when we write. So why would we compound that problem by doing so intentionally?
It’s painfully obvious that I personally have zero chance of answering that, because I literally don’t have a clue.
I can tell you that leaving any character or setting details up to the reader’s imagination will not pull the reader deeper into the story by ‘involving’ him more. It will have the opposite effect: It will give him a wide-open avenue of escape from the story.
But those who read my stories most often say they feel as if they’re in the scene—in the story—with the characters. And I do know why that happens.
It happens because I write and then cycle back sometimes three or four times to make sure the reader is seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling—both physically and emotionally—exactly what the POV character’s experiencing as the story unfolds.
You can’t see it, but I just put one hand up a little to ward off all the “Yeah buts…” (Yabbuts).
I understand that we all have different lives and different experiences. As I said in yesterday’s issue of TNDJ, I write fiction primarily so I can vicariously live some of the experiences I missed out on in real life.
But you don’t have to endure Marine Corps basic training to understand that details matter.
This just in….
At this point as I was writing this, I got a perfect, illustrative comment from Tiffanie Gray (who by the way is a proud veteran of the United States Army) about yesterday’s post. Tiffanie wrote
You wrote “I make a couple of mugs of coffee, put on my coat and hat, and walk 150 feet out my back door to my office in the Hovel.”
I saw a feller in his PJs and bare feet, put on an old flannel-lined jacket and a worn fedora over the PJ’s, pick up his 2 mugs of coffee, and trudge barefoot across the dry-dirt path out to the adobe shed that serves as his man-cave, to sip his lonely way into the dark.
In my response, I told Tiff she was right. I thanked her for at least giving me the pajamas. Then I said I should’ve mentioned the boots, jeans and t-shirt too. … And if I’d been writing that scene in fiction, I would have.
In other words, the ‘picture’ she got in her head was completely my fault. She might also have seen the guy wearing nothing but the coat and hat (blush), or wearing dress slacks and a white dress shirt or sweats or whatever else.
Why? Because I didn’t fill in the details. And it’s the writer’s responsibility to do so.
The old advice holds true: When you put a noun in a sentence, you put a picture in the reader’s mind. When you add an action verb, the noun moves.
And when you omit a noun that should be there, the reader fills in the blank with what s/he wants to see, and the story is no longer yours.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
22 Ways to Grow Your Author Email List
Hardcover vs. paperback: key considerations for your next book An article recommended by Dave Chesson, the Kindlepreneur
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1140
Mentorship Words…………….. 210
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1350
Writing of Blackwell Ops 51: Sam Granger | The Road Back
Day 1…… 2807 words. To date………… 2807
Day 2…… 2489 words. To date………… 5296
Day 3…… 3111 words. To date………… 8407
Day 4…… 2430 words. To date………… 10837
Day 5…… 3274 words. To date………… 14111
Day 6…… 4034 words. To date………… 18145
Day 7…… 2686 words. To date………… 20831
Day 8…… 2813 words. To date………… 23644
Fiction for November……………………… 40705
Fiction for 2025…………………………… 702746
Nonfiction for November.………………… 13230
Nonfiction for 2025………………..……… 25270
2025 consumable words………………… 947877
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 17
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 121
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29