We came home and exploded across the house—library manga, art supplies, laundry, dishes, groceries, leftover bits of food, the dog’s disintegrating toy. I thought entropy was the move toward disorder, the necessary unraveling, though in All the Light We Cannot See it’s given just as a measure of disorder’s degree.
Each item overwhelms me. Scotch tape. A dry erase pen. A scrap of pink paper. A bit of string or floss. A scrap of linty tape. Nine books, several open to particular pages. A pink pad of paper. Two pieces of white paper with kids’ sketches on them. (Can these be thrown away or should they be saved?) A postcard about a million dollar home for sale not far from us. This is what sits on our coffee table over a stretch of fabric from a Japanese colleague of my father: red, silver and fringed.
Early my first morning back from the beach, I met with a student to help her kill her darlings, at the request of her publisher. It was a painful process, to begin to recognize that the story didn’t need what she loved, the part she felt as her voice, that it stood and was felt without the rattle of the bones. For so long I’ve been saying that the setting contains the emotion and the meaning of the scene. But it doesn’t contain it like a secret code nor like a hidden box with no findable entry. Still less is the setting a sheet thrown over the bumpy substance of truth, smoothed down to reveal the shape beneath. Rather the things of your story’s world contain the emotion and meaning in themselves. Trees! The sky! That roll of scotch tape, the platic cracked, the cardboard label buckling, the open, empty box of gum beside it, stained green with the word Extra printed across it in bold font. They give you me, lying on my couch in the refrigerator-backed quiet of early morning, a throw blanket over my legs and Mary Oliver cracked open by my phone and an extra pen, me torn between writing and cleaning and sleeping—always having to pick one.
What details catch your eye today? Tell us in the comments below. And then let them speak for you in your writing. They really will.