I want to qualify the title I’ve given to this piece because sometimes the detail is really important to how a story hangs together. I guess I’m thinking about myself with my new writing challenge, a book set over sixty years ago in the 1950’s. I keep side-tracking myself by checking small pieces of information – the latest was, how many hours a day did an office worker work in 1954? The rough answer was about forty-eight hours a week on average. Then I wanted to remember the exact name for the type of wraparound pinafore/apron which had broad shoulders and covered the back as well as the front of the working person. Was it an overall? Not really because it had no sleeves. Was it a pinafore/pinny, not sure because it had a back. Was it a tabard – definitely no because that was a front piece and back piece fastened by a connecting strip of fabric.
Instead of worrying now about these details I want to just write the story – the woman in question, Rosie’s landlady wears an apron – I can put in more detail about it when the story is finished, can’t I!
Number 13, it seemed a little ominous, was where Rosie had her room… it was only as he raised his hand to rap on the door that Mike realised he should have asked what her surname was… too late, his hand had continued its path, grabbed the lion head knocker lifted and banged it down.
After a few moments a woman with her hair in curlers and a scarf round her head stared at him from the doorway. She was wearing a green floral pinafore, rather faded, a bit like herself, faded… and jaded… she was speaking to him.
“Yes, what do you want?” she asked rather rudely, possibly repeating herself, then taking a puff of her cigarette.
“Oh good evening, my name is Michael Scott I’m from the Easthope Bugle…” he hadn’t meant to say that at all, he’d just gone into his automatic introduction. “I understand you have rooms to rent and –“
He hadn’t meant to say that either, but she cut across him and said she only rented to decent young ladies, no gentlemen, young ladies with references, one guinea a week, two weeks in advance…
“Yes, yes,” now Mike interrupted her. “It was about one of your young ladies, Rosie…”
“Rosemary Squires… like the singer, that’s not her real name… do you want to write about her, cheeky young madam!”
“Can I speak to Miss Squires, please, Mrs Um…?”
“If you know where to find her, I’m sure you can,” the woman was beginning to close the door.
“Is she not in her room?” Mike stepped forward rather dramatically, catching the sole of his shoe on the uneven paving stones.
“Stopped out all night… well that’s the last night she’s not stopping here, gone off with a sailor no doubt” she put her cigarette in her mouth and reached behind her. “I’ve got her case here, all her belongings… you tell her, Mr. Michaels that she’s not welcome.”
A battered cardboard suitcase was thrust into his arms and the door was shut, leaving Mike coughing in a cloud of smoke.
© Lois Elsden 2018
That is part of what I mean about detail – write the thing then fill in the descriptive parts later. Sometimes, however everything comes out all at once and there is page after page of descriptive language with every possible thing you might need to write about a particular thing – sometimes then, it’s the detail which has to go. I seem to over-write, so I definitely have a very firm slash and burn attitude to revision.
There is an idiom ‘the devil is in the detail’, which may have been originally ‘God is in the detail’; I think I rather misunderstood this phrase – not that I have ever used it. No-one seems sure where it originated, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or The New York Times quoting him? Aby Warburg or his biographer, E. H. Gombrich? Flaubert? That well-known originator of so many phrases and sayings, Anonymous? I thought it meant that the substance of a thing was in the complicated heart of it, but apparently it means a catch or mysterious element hidden in the details, so some apparently simple thing is actually more complicated to understand/do/complete than you first thought.
… I don’t think I’ll use that expression, it might lead to misunderstanding if I still haven’t quite grasped it!!
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Lois Elsden 