At the beginning of the movie Throw Mama from the Train we see Billy Crystal teaching his fiction writing course. A student is reading her story aloud to the class. Her story is set on a submarine, and she clearly knows very little about military operations or even how a submarine operates.
See the 34-second clip: here
If the movie were to continue, you would see the class break out into applause. And then, it falls upon the exasperated instructor to point out to her that she should probably know the names of things on a submarine… and how a submarine even operates. You can’t just say, “He pressed the button that makes it dive or whatever.” You need to know.
Otherwise, your story lacks authenticity.
There’s an adage when it comes to writing where mentors will say, “Write what you know.” People have often debated what that means. Does it mean you can only write about experiences that you’ve had? Does it erase the fact that writers have imaginations and even an ability to recreate experiences they haven’t had? One of the great American war novels, Red Badge of Courage, was written by Stephen Crane, who had yet to experience any combat at the time of writing. What if he’d decided not to write it because he wasn’t able to “write what he knows.” What do we actually mean when we say, “Write what you know”?
That I don’t know… and the debate will go on, I’m sure.
What I want to offer instead is “Know what you write,” and I think of this applying directly to an aspect of the craft of fiction called authentic detail.
What is that exactly? Well, it just means getting the facts right… making what happens in your story authentic, believable… true to life (in literary fiction, verisimilitude is very important).
Say for instance your story begins with a character opening her late-night door to a police officer. The police officer is there to deliver the news that her husband died in a car accident that evening. Now, here’s the rub… do you have any idea how that exchange would actually go down? Police would have a protocol as to how to deliver such news.
What you would want is an actual police officer to be reading your story and thinking, “Yup, that’s pretty much what we would say and do.”
If a police officer read your story and said, “Well, this is bullshit. This is nothing like it would be”… well, then, your story (at least in that section) lacks authentic detail.
Your story is inauthentic. (That doesn’t sound good, does it)
I remember a student sharing a story once in my course. In the story, a bartender and a waitress are closing down a bar. They are also having a conversation about what’s going on in their lives, and this is where we truly begin to see the deeper conflict in the main character (the female bartender). While the characters are talking, the bartender is taking the plastic nozzles off of the pop dispensers and dropping them in a cup of hot water.
When she was done reading, I said, “You’ve worked as a bartender, haven’t you?” She smiled and nodded and asked how I knew. I said, “Because in a lot of stories I read that have bartenders, the only thing the bartender seems to do is pour drinks or wipe down the bar with a rag… that thing your bartender was doing with the nozzles, that just felt authentic.”
She confirmed that the nozzles need to be soaked every night or they would gum up with pop syrup and wouldn’t work or would barely work the next day.
She knew what she was writing. That moment in the story was very authentic. Now, was the main character’s conflict something that the writer had been through? Probably not. But, the actions of her bartender made the story more believable because the bartender was acting authentically. Any other bartender would read that story and say, “Yup, that’s what we do.”
You need to get the details right. And, if you can’t, you need to do research. You need to look for moments in your story that need authentic detail. Don’t risk jarring your reader from the story by having inauthentic moments.
When I was writing my story “Insomnia” (which is in my new collection, The Neighborhood Division) I had just one of those moments. In the story, I have a man, Gordon LaFarge, who lost his wife. She worked in a women’s shelter, and an angry husband had come in looking for his wife. He’d grabbed Gordon’s wife’s head and bounced it off the security glass and then ran into the shelter looking for his wife. Gordon’s wife subsequently died.
This sent Gordon into living a life of complete isolation from the world. He and his son live in their house, but never leave. They have groceries delivered, the son attends online school, and the dad works his online businesses (kinda sounds familiar right now in quarantine).
Gordon wants no contact with anyone (since anyone is a potential danger in his mind)
Then, late one night, his neighbor bangs on his door, shouting through the glass that Gordon has a fire in his basement. Gordon thinks it’s a trick so the neighbor can get in and attack them. It’s the son who lets the fire extinguisher-wielding neighbor in and directs him to the basement… where there is indeed a fire in the dryer. The neighbor had also called the fire department.
Here’s what I needed to know: How long would the fire department stick around if they arrived and the fire was already out? What would the protocol be? I was pretty sure they didn’t show up, see the fire out, and say, “Ok, see ya later.”
I knew there was a protocol, but I didn’t know what it was. What did I do? Well, I called a local fire department, got transferred to the chief, and then I asked my questions.
He was hesitant at first, and he asked some questions. I think once he felt certain that I was just a nutty writer and not a nutty arsonist, he was willing to answer my questions. We actually talked for forty minutes and, as a result, I’m certain that section of my story is very authentic.
Here’s the scene from “Insomnia” if you’re curious:
It’s several nights later at three thirty in the morning when someone’s determined knocking booms from the front door. Reflexively, Gordon presses off the television and pulls Luke closer to him. They sit in the darkness, listening.
The knocking hammers again.
“Dad, you--”
“Shh.”
The doorbell rings. Luke stands too quickly for Gordon to pull him back into his grip.
The dark shadow of his son stands five feet from him, like a haunting. “I’m going to get it if you don’t, Dad.”
“Luke, sit down,” he hisses.
There’s more frantic knocking.
“Coming!” Luke hollers, not moving.
The man on the other side of the door shouts.
Gordon knows that Luke is studying his hunched silhouette cowering on the couch. He stands. He breathes deeply and steps to the foyer. The dark outline of a head moves on the other side of the door’s small window. “Who is it?” Gordon says.
“Your neighbor. You’ve got a fire!”
Gordon does nothing, guessing that it’s a trick. That’s the kind of line criminals use to get fools to open their doors.
Luke reaches past him and turns on the front light. “Dad!” The boy turns the deadbolt and opens the door to a tall, blonde man squinting in the sudden brightness. It’s Connor Wallace, the neighbor from across the street. He cradles a fire extinguisher the color of a heart.
“Where’s your basement?!”
Gordon’s mouth moves. Nothing comes out.
“I think your house is on fire! Where’s your basement?”
Gordon feels weighted by this news. His adrenaline doesn’t spread to his limbs but instead seems to back up into his head, leaving a deafening roar.
“Follow me,” Luke says. “Come on.”
The man pushes past Gordon, and Luke leads him through the dark to the back of the house.
The smell of the smoke drifts to the foyer. He hears his son calling down to the basement. “Don’t you go down those stairs, Luke,” Gordon manages to shout. A fire engine pulls up along the street – all lights and men and radio dispatch squawk. Three shadows run toward the house.
The firemen double check to make certain that the fire is out. Connor Wallace paces an excited circle. “I’m pretty sure I got it all,” he says. The firemen take down Gordon’s name and insurance information. Gordon eyes him, but Connor doesn’t react when he hears Gordon’s full name spoken aloud. He’s talking to one of the firemen. “Lot of juice in these babies,” he says, holding up his extinguisher. “Lot of juice.”
The firemen seem almost seven feet tall in their uniforms and with their questions. While they are there, the house belongs to them, and they move about freely. Luke follows them around as though he’s been called to a new religion.
The battalion chief turns to Connor Wallace to get his story. He explains that he had a few beers before bed and then woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. He opens Gordon’s blind and points to his house and shows them the bathroom window.
“I saw what looked like a wisp of smoke coming from the foundation of his house,” he says, and moves his hand. He guessed that he was just seeing things. Then, while flushing, he took another look, and the smoke was heavier. “I called you guys on my cell and then ran over here with this little baby.”
The battalion chief and the other firemen commend Connor. The chief turns back to Gordon. “Just check that vent about once every three months. It’s just a little thing, but it can be huge. Lots of houses have burned to the ground because of a dryer fire.”
Gordon nods. Standing, he follows Luke who follows the other men to the door.
Connor walks with one of the fireman towards the truck. “I mean, at first I didn’t think it was anything. Next thing you know I’m in some basement putting out a fire.”
Gordon goes back to the couch. His guilt and fear and shame settle over him like heavy clothes pulling him down into a drowning. He drifts in his numbness and is startled when Luke turns off the television.
“I think I’m going to go to bed.”
Gordon looks at the darkness outside. “Already?”
“I’m just tired,” he says. “I think most people sleep at night.” He stops with his foot on the first step to the upstairs. “You didn’t even thank him, Dad.”
“What?”
“That man who put out the fire. Mr. Wallace. You didn’t even say thank you.”
“That’s right, I didn’t,” he murmurs. “What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t know,” Luke says, disappearing up the stairs.
It’s certainly something to think about for your own stories. How do I get the details right? How do I know they are true? Who can I get to read this to confirm its authenticity?
Authentic detail is essential to continue the illusion of your pages, your words… your world as being something that your reader can effortlessly escape into and perceive as real.
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