Putting Details and Big Ideas together

Here at Creative Writing Corner, I often talk about getting the little things in your writing just right. It's important to tighten up your writing, improve your vocab and sharpen your use of imagery, for example. It's also important, however, to learn how to reconcile the big with the small.

A story operates by leaping gracefully from the tiniest details to the biggest ideas and back again. When writing your story, you've got to keep the little techniques and devices you're using in balance with the overarching plot and message. When I'm writing, I find that I often get an idea for a story based on a very small thing. It might be a look between two people, an odd little incident that occurs in my life, or a funny anecdote dredged up from my childhood memory. What makes a telling of this small thing important and interesting, however, is a bigger idea about what it all means. I've got to have at least a vague idea of that going in, or else my story will be stale and inconsequential.

After the jump: how to put big and small together.

Don't be heavyhanded. While you're writing, don't try to trouble yourself too much about the big, sweeping ideas. A lot of the time, the big ideas will insert themselves more gracefully if they're never dealt with explicitly. Instead, it's good to have them running as a subtext, an undercurrent to the story. As long as you are thinking seriously about what something means, it's going to come out in your writing.

Don't get too symbolic. Unless you're purposefully writing an allegory, it's going to get annoying if you start making every concrete thing mean something big and abstract. Oh, the teapot is her love for her children, and that shirt he wears represents his depression! So when he takes off the shirt, he's shedding his depression! Honestly, that sort of one-to-one business can get downright obnoxious. Nothing in life is that simple, and we're going for realistic fiction here.

Do let the story open up. So you're recounting a very specific incident in the story. Your details are clear and targeted, You've got a well-crafted scene. Here's the moment where you open up the story by having a sentence or a line of dialogue that can have both a specific and a broad interpretation. An example of this is if you have a story about a guy with a drug addiction. If he's struggling whether to give up drugs or not, there could be a moment at a crucial scene where he's holding something, something dear to him like a sentimental object you've established background for. Another character asks him if he's going to give it up or throw it out. In that moment, the line of dialogue expands outward, coming to speak for the entire struggle of the story.

So the important thing about reconciling the big and the small is to leave a few key areas that are open for interpretation -- that could be read as either big or small, or both. Keep your head in the details while you're writing, but when you reach a climactic point, allow a sentence or two to wonder about what it all might mean.

Comments

[Red clip in hair extensions]

Greeting. There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
I am from Czech and also now am reading in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Manba and yamanba are much to be seen."

Thanks :P. Red clip in hair extensions.