Click – Click. Click – Click.
As I wandered along the sidewalk by the moat of Chiang Mai’s Old City, I was consumed by a thought.
A delicious memory that brought a goofy grin to my face and wiped my brain slate clean. Completely lost in my mind and unaware of my surroundings I could easily have been walking on a sidewalk in Maine or Seminyak. I’m lucky I didn’t walk out into traffic or directly into another wanderer.
Yet the Click – Click. Click – Click. It brought me back.
A small noise.
A simple wooden fountain outside a Thai massage parlor. With a wooden water wheel that hit against a suspended wooden block. It made a noise each time the wheel spokes knocked into the solid wood. Click – Click. Click – Click.
My first night adventuring out from my new hotel after Jenny left, I had noted the noise somewhere in the crooks of my memory. Like a sticky in a file folder to be pulled out when necessary for reference. I note a lot of these little things. A business sign. An intersection. A flower patch in a park. The way a particular tree trunk twists as it springs up from the ground.
Details are what make the story interesting.
They separate one street from another – someone’s friend from their Aunt Mary – a magical blue amulet from a magical green one.
We’ve all been there before. Trapped in an ongoing story that is either so dry that it might as well be a military itinerary of events or so engulfed in flowery language that you want to throw up a little. When I was younger I personally wanted to go back in time and throat-punch Thomas Hardy for nearly 40 pages of exposition on the fields and moorlands of England.
Details are essentially broken down into three categories:
- Crucial – Pivotal facts on which the story hinges (The location of the fountain in its function to alerting me to turn right to get home)
- Significant – Give the person/place/thing their essence (A wooden water wheel outside a Thai massage parlor)
- Enhancing – Add to the experience but unnecessary to the actual plot/drive (The Click – Click. Click – Click. sound)
Interestingly the crucial and significant details are not always the most captivating. In this case, they tell the story but they aren’t what is memorable. It is the enhancing detail – the simple inclusion – that sticks in people’s minds. The Click – Click. Click – Click.
Mind the details. They might seem like they don’t matter and can be thrown away, but that is rarely the case.
It is in the details that a beautiful story gets told.
Elisa Doucette is a writer and editor who works with professional writers, entrepreneurs, and brands that want to make their own words even better. She is the Founder of Craft Your Content, and oversees Client Strategy and Writing Coaching. Her own writing has been featured in places like Forbes, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yahoo! Small Business, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also hosts the Writers' Rough Drafts podcast here on CYC. When she isn't writing, editing, or reading words, she can usually be found at a local pub quiz, deep in a sun salutation, or binging TV shows for concept ideas and laughs.
