My father takes the saxophone out of his mouth, his face so close I can practically feel his scratchy nine o'clock shadow. It's Saturday night, the end of his six-day work week, so there's the sweet smell of whiskey laced with the musty, tea-like fragrance of the sax reed in the air. And the old tune he's just honked still hangs between our two smiles.
When that childhood remembrance came back to me the other day as I worked out in the gym, it gave me such a pang of happiness -- to have my dead father so near again, not in his final ravaged state but full of vibrancy. And as I breathed in the moment, it also came to me how those little out-of-the-blue details are so important in bringing my writing to life.
I conjure them up as I write the way one takes jewels out of a box, to adorn my fictional characters. Or like some cawing crow scavenging a shiny bottle cap out of a field and flying home. Sometimes I don't even know the memories are still there, and then they suddenly surface, little remnants in the folds of my mind.
Writers can't underestimate those fine details, whether they are pure imaginings or borrowed from the past. They can add a touch of alchemy, not only for fictional works but feature stories in magazines that allow for colorful nuancing.
Do you remember the extraordinarily long fingernail on Harvey Keitel's pinky in Taxi Driver? I have no idea if Paul Schraeder and/or Martin Scorcese lifted that out of reality for the pimp Sport. But that's the kind of small texturing I'm referring to.
Emotions and ideas also can be made more real that way. Consider one of my favorite scenes in An Education, Nick Hornby's film script adaptation of Lynn Barber's autobiographical essay. After young Jenny makes love for the first time, she says: "It's funny, though, isn't it? All that poetry, and all those songs, about something that lasts no time at all?" And that's followed by the stage direction: "David looks at her. She isn't being cruel. She just doesn't know any different ... He smokes ruminatively."
You can also see that fine nuancing throughout Tan Twan Eng's Booker-prize-nominated novel The Gift of Rain. Here's how he describes the character Isabel as she ponders her feelings for the dead mother she hardly knew: "She rolled her glass of wine between her hands, like a potter giving shape to his creation."
I also love one particular passage in the novel Never Let Me Go (another Booker nominee) for the same reason. It occurs after the narrator of the story is exposed as a sort of traitor to a boy named Tommy who's been her good friend: "I can recall now, as fresh as anything, Tommy's own face, the anger receding for the moment, being replaced by an expression almost of wonder, like I was a rare butterfly he'd found on a fence post."
Whether or not that actually happened to the author Kazuo Ishiguro, I don't know. But he put me inside the mind of the narrator so that I felt like it was happening to me. Just one little sentence floating on a sea of other words, an amazing bauble. You can bet I'll be searching for that expression when the novel's film adaptation is released.What are your memories of real events, or sentences from stories, that work that kind of magic for you? I'd love to know. Perhaps you hold them too close, too dearly, to express them here. But regardless, I hope you never let them go.
