{"id":9996,"date":"2022-09-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9996"},"modified":"2022-09-14T21:09:09","modified_gmt":"2022-09-15T01:09:09","slug":"the-demands-of-craft-why-details-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9996","title":{"rendered":"The Demands of Craft: Why Details Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Handwriting,<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In an interview published a few years ago, but well worth this second look, author Alexander Parsons<\/a> provided considerable useful advice (and support!) for other writers. Now an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Houston, Parsons is the author of the award-winning Leaving Disneyland <\/em>and In the Shadows of the Sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New writers, he believes, are lucky they don\u2019t know what they don\u2019t know about writing. It looks deceptively easy. \u201cThe more you commit to it, the more time you spend learning the craft, the more overcoming your ignorance feels like an extended alpine stage of the Tour de France,\u201d he said. Good writing\u2014and isn\u2019t that what we all aspire to?\u2014isn\u2019t a skill, or a practice that you just \u201cpick up, like learning to throw a Frisbee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parsons would probably endorse the idea that a good writer is always<\/em> learning the craft. There\u2019s so much to know, so many craft details, that you can\u2019t take it in all at once. In my own case, I have gradually tried to teach myself to recognize my own writing tics\u2014you know, the weak sentence structures and repetitive word patterns that appear in a first draft, as I\u2019m setting the story down, but need to be scrubbed out later. (Examples: \u201cThere is,\u201d \u201cthere are,\u201d \u201cthings\u201d instead of more concrete nouns; sentences with too many adjectives or too few.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Shadows of the Sun<\/em> included portions that take place in the Philippines and Japan, neither of which he\u2019d visited at the time he wrote about them. Research\u2014in books and photographs\u2014let him visualize the setting, but he believes the lack of first-hand knowledge also freed him. \u201cThe landscape of fiction is always the landscape of imagination,\u201d he says. \u201cFiction organizes and alters the factual to serve the larger truths embodied in the work.\u201d I interpret this to mean not just the larger facts of plot and character development, but also reaching down to the sentence and word level. Possibly many readers gloss over the precise details, but I cannot help but think that at some level, they sense the difference between a red dress that the author describes as \u201ccherry\u201d versus \u201cruby\u201d versus (god forbid) blood-red.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parsons\u2019s first novel, Leaving Disneyland<\/em>, explored prison culture and its effects on inmates, current and former. Learning enough detail about that world to write about it forcefully, honestly, and authentically took him several years, he says. Despite the amount of effort involved, he believes mastering the details of a character, a place, an environment let you write \u201cfrom a point of view that takes you out of your comfort zone.\u201d Scary, but possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When writers take on that challenge, they not only connect with the story they\u2019re trying to tell, but also with their readers. It\u2019s easy to create characters that are thinly disguised versions of oneself, but they are ultimately thin, not very satisfying, gruel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview published a few years ago, but well worth this second look, author Alexander Parsons provided considerable useful advice (and support!) for other writers. Now an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Houston, Parsons is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"How many times do you have to read over your manuscript? Only until you get the details right.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,174,51,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-first-draft-blog","category-words","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Be","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9997,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996\/revisions\/9997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}