I guess a lot if not most writers add little details into their work which come from observations made, sometimes briefly, sometimes studied, recently or many years ago. I’m working on something at the moment in which a pair of stunning emerald drop earrings are significant. I imagine them to be precious in every sense, and old, maybe very old, maybe a hundred or so years old and inherited from some unnamed ancestor.
A character was describing another person, and mentioned she had earrings with ’emeralds to die for’ and later such earrings were noticed and so the wearer was identified. As I wrote it, the earrings were just part of a general description, arriving randomly from some filing cabinet in my brain. I subsequently – in fact some time later, realised where they had originally come from, and it was in the 1970’s. I was in a hairdressers, an old lady sort of a place and I noticed an elderly client who looked rather eccentric. She was a tiny bird-like woman, and I guess was in her seventies, if not eighties. Her hair was rather wild, and still brown, but with grey running through, and she wore a long gypsyish skirt, a black woollen jacket, and black rather battered shoes. She was a dear old thing, and the hairdressers obviously liked her and she gossiped away with them, making them laugh with her tales.
She departed, and the two hairdressers commented fondly about her, what a nice old soul she was, what an interesting and somewhat mysterious life she had led, and one of them said something about her ‘earrings with emeralds to die for’! I’d noticed her drop earrings, silver, or maybe platinum, the emeralds (the hairdressers were sure they really were and I believed them) large, and so heavy they’d pulled her ears down, and it put me off having my ears pierced for some time!
You can tell it made an impression on me, that I used the earrings in my story, but I have so many observations packed away in my brain, so many tiny, insignificant things which I’ve noticed and mentally photographed. I do make things up, I do imagine things, but most of what I write has some little nugget of reality. I’m on a social media site for would-be writers, and I quite often remark that whatever genre anyone writes in, observation of the real world is crucial, watch, observe, remember – and not just visually, sounds from nature, scraps of conversation, odd noises, snippets of music. Even if something is imagined, fantasy perhaps, or paranormal, or alien, real things can inform the description – and even become crucial, even if they’re small. As small as a pair of emerald earrings, for example.
Lois Elsden 