I was glad to talk to writer, friend, and fellow professor Salvatore Scibona about detail. His course, The Craft of Style addresses the nuances of language. Earlier, I said the description is the mother of vivid fiction. That's true, but language is the mother of description. Language is a writer's only real medium. Words are all we've got when we write, no other tools. So wait, does that make language fiction's grandmother? Hi, Salvatore. >> Hi, Amity. >> So why do details matter? >> [LAUGH] Well, without them, you have an essay, basically, I think. Language communicates by turning a thing into an idea and then the idea goes into the brain, and where it can stay an idea or it can turn back into a thing. Do you know what I mean? So because fiction or story writing is so much a question of making the thing real without physical detail, you can't form a picture. It feels sort of self-evident to most people in the abstract. But when you write and you don't give people anything to look at, the reader can't assume her way into the color of a person's skin or what kind of clothes the person is wearing. You've got to at some point put physical things on a person, for example, on a character, and then that person becomes human in a way that they really can't if you just describe their qualities in the abstract. >> And learners, this might remind you of what we were talking about in the very first segment about being persuasive and Mario Vargas says term, persuasive. You're echoing that right now. >> Can I just say about persuasive? I know that you've been focusing on that word and I think it's such an interesting, it's not the word that people would think should be the priority for fiction writing, because it sounds like shouldn't a politician be interested in being persuasive. >> Right. >> But one time, I was in a jury meeting at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown where you and I have both been on the jury from time to time. And someone who was having a disagreement with another juror said, well, it sounds like you're persuaded of this character, you're persuaded of the story. And once that happens, I can't talk to you out of it. I realize that's really true, that's the power of a persuasive. You persuade the person of the reality of the world and then it kind of doesn't go back after that. >> Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's very well put. I know in your module you're also talking about William Carlos, William's phrase, know ideas, but in things. Is that what you were just mentioning about description and detail is the difference between say, an essay and a story? >> Yeah, exactly. An essay like a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end or usually it should. But in some way, the idea, the way of being convinced of an idea in an essay comes by force of agreement. Do you know? But in a story you don't, you can fall completely into a story about people who's values you valiantly don't share at all. You don't have to agree with anything that Huck Finn does. But if you're persuaded of the reality of Huck Finn, it obviously doesn't matter in terms of the story. >> What is literary style? And why does style matter? >> Well, I guess I think of language as being the shared thing, the objectively existing thing, you and I speak the same language. We're both Americans born in America, we speak more or less the same version of English. I can imitate your style, I never use your style. You could never really use my style because it's the filter of who you are. It's something that you can inflect it. You can fake a little bit here or there, there's something fundamental about the sound of your own voice. That doesn't mean that it comes out of nowhere and you can't change it, however and part of what I think we look at in my class is the way there are certain moves that you can make at the level of language that can change your style in ways that might not have been visible to you before. It's very common piece of advice that you get is to write in the active voice rather than the passive voice, for example. And that's the difference between saying Amity sat in the chair versus the chair was sat in by Amity, or more often people will say, the chair was sat in. You would admit that's a terrible sentence, but that's awful. It's a perfectly legitimate sentence, but it obscures the person who was there. Now, it might be in your habits to write in the passive voice, but you can get to the point of understanding how that little move can improve your style. But at the fundamental level, it's what's singular about your use of language. >> Could you name us a couple of literature's greatest stylist? >> Stylist? Well, I really contemporary writers, I'm very fond of. Don DeLillo who just turned 80 I guess, has had a long career, he's a wonderful, wonderful writer of dialog, a wonderful describer of the contemporary world, but I don't know. I mean, I think, basically, every novelist that I really, really loved. In some way, I came to love them by loving their style. It didn't really matter. I mean, Saul Bellow, for example. I don't know, I don't come from his world in any strong way or the writer who I really, really love, Halldor Laxness is an Icelandic novelist. Many people in the English language. English speaking world know about him, many don't. You should read him. I mean, I don't know his world at all, but there's something about the style. He has an ability, for example, to go for pages and pages and pages staying totally within a story and in the past tense. And then at one point in this terrible scene in Independent People after the farmer takes the calf away from the cow who's just given birth to it and takes it to the slaughterhouse. Laxness has the cow put its head in the window of the hut and he says cow's weep. It's in the present tense and there's something so powerful about this moment that 600- page novel that's in the past tense. All of it is in the past tense, except for this little moment where you put that thing in the present, it's as though the cow is coming into your own house at that moment. It's such a small thing but I loved Laxness for that reason also. I love Jone Diddian, I love Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison was one of the writer's that really made me want to start being a writer. She actually is from the town next to where I'm from in Ohio. So we share geography, nothing else. >> That's right, that's right. I think sometimes writers do identify with writer's that come from their region and later in this quest we'll talk about regionalism and regional writing, as well. Do you remember being observant as a child? And is a level of observation sort of central to becoming a writer from your point of view? >> Well, I don't think that you have to be particularly observant to start with, but I think the practice, don't you find this? That the practice of writing compels you to be, has that been your experience? >> Maybe they make each other. An observant person is attracted to literature, which is about observation and then the more that you practice that, the more observant you become as a person. Maybe there's some relationship. >> Yeah, I think there's something. In someway, I think that children are absolutely perfect observing machines. I mean, we're all really good at it, but something gets in the way later in life when you start understanding more about how things are organized, so you stop seeing, I'm looking at a fireplace elsewhere in this room. And instead of seeing all of the particularities of what's there, you just see it, coded as fireplace and then you know how it works, you know what it's for, and you don't pay attention to it. Children not knowing what things are for tend to see the substance, the surface of the thing better. And I really often feel that as fiction writers, we have a license to be stupid. And often, when I'm really going really well, I feel kind of deeply stupid, because I'm occupying a portion of my mind that is all in the eyes and the ears, and doesn't necessarily demand that all of the things that I'm observing cohere under some grand scheme. And then the editorial process later on maybe helps you curate those observations better. But when you're really present in a scene with a moment, with a thing, it feels totally innocent the way it does it. >> In a Buddhist philosophy, that's called beginners mind. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> If you want to try a practice in which you cultivate a child's mind or a beginner mind, try looking at a thing as if you haven't seen it before. Try walking through a day or a landscape as if you are a child seeing it for the first time and maybe you will be able to see it with sort of renewed sensitivity. You wrote an amazing and ambitious, prize winning novel called The End and you set the novel in the year 1953 in an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Ohio. And later, we'll hear from Amy Bloom about writing about 1920s New York and Valerie Martin about writing historical fiction in the era of slavery in America. So, I imagine you have much to say about what it's, the unique challenges of writing a persuasive fiction that's set in a different time and place. Can you tell us a little bit about that process, what was it like? Did you consider yourself creating or recreating a world? >> Yeah, I think that you have to create the world whether you come from that world or not. And that is a real challenge I think for people who are writing memoir, writing somewhat autobiographical fiction. It might seem like the kind of job that only someone who is writing something set in the deep past has to do, but if you don't get the lived in texture of 2015, even writer's, reader's in 2015 won't be able to follow where you are. In either case, I guess word choice. One of the really amazing things about word choice is that a single word covers a lot more space in the reader's imagination than just that spot. So if I said, if I had a person washing clothes and then putting them through the wringer. If I just use the word wringer, nobody in America anyway, people don't use wringers to wring out their clothes anymore and that's a relatively small word. It's not a word we often see, but it's coded in the readers mind as a certain moment in technological history right. Not many ringers probably in the 1750s and not many more by 1960, I don't know. Just something like that where the word choice and sometimes the word choice is- sometimes you pick a word that is specific to a time like my grandmother would sometimes, she said, someone had pleurisy and that's not a word that we use anymore or she would use the definite articles in front of a word that we wouldn't use a definite article in front of it anymore. Like have you seen the Batman? >> [LAUGH] >> It's not what its called. They're very small things that sort of put her in a certain time or put her locations in a certain time. I don't really, I guess one thing that's very intimidating for people who are writing about the past or writing about a place that's distant from them is that they think they have to have all of it. They have to understand all of it and they should understand as much of it as they can. But it in the end, the final phenomenon of the story is a cooperation of the writer and the reader together. The reader is bringing her own imagination and expectations and understanding of that time and place and forming something in her mind based on what you've put on the page. So it's not just what you've made, it's what she's made also. War and Peace is a historical novel, even you think of this thing that it's so full of detail and Tolstoy was not alive in 1812 to tell any of this, even something like that. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written about 30 or 40 years before the time that it was written. So, we all have this problem. We all have this problem whether we're writing about the present, the past or where we come from. >> Thank you so much, Salvatore. It's wonderful to talk to you about language and place. Check out Salvatore's course.
