A Way to Write Vivid Details
How to write more vivid, concrete details using things you remember or things you don’t.
Visiting the Mayan ruins in Tulum, Mexico. Photo: Tanya Clarke 2018
I Remember
Are you familiar with the book I Remember by Joe Brainard?
Every sentence begins with the words I remember. It’s kind of wonderful, a beautifully simple way to write a memoir, each memory surfacing like a bubble releasing its image as it pops.
Some of the sentences are short, simple statements, for example:
I remember liver.
Sometimes Brainard’s words come together into a longer piece of prose:
I remember a girl in school one day who, just out of the blue, went into a long spiel all about how difficult it was to wash her brother’s pants because he didn’t wear underwear.
Sometimes the sentences follow on from one another layering one memory over another. And then, there are the sentences that exist on their own, as a thin narrow island of words tethered above and below by the space of the blank page.
There’s such clarity to I Remember, such beauty and simplicity that reflects the tenuous way we remember moments in our lives. Our memories can be unreliable, an outline at best, the gaps filled in with other memories and the glorious expanse of our imagination.
Concrete Details
Let’s take some advice from Alice Laplante in her book The Making of a Story.
“Goal:
To pinpoint some previously unexplored material that remains “hot” for you in some important emotional way.
What to do:
1. Scan back over your life and think of things that have stuck in your mind, but for no obvious reason. (No births or deaths or other “important” moments, please. Go for the small ones.)
2. Render them precisely on the page using concrete details, beginning each one with the phrase, “I don’t know why I remember.”
3. Don’t try to explain why they stuck with you, or interpret the meaning of them. Just put your reader there.”p.38, The Making of a Story by Alive LaPlante
This isn’t a Test
You can try this same exercise with I remember or I don’t remember. Write for ten minutes or an hour, however much time you have. Try not to think too hard. And don’t worry about your memory being ‘correct’. There could be something in these sentences leading you to a story you didn’t know was there.
If it helps, use the above photograph as a prompt for your memory. Look around. Are there any details you’re drawn to but don’t know why? And as LaPlante suggests, try to bring to mind small moments rather than large important events. How does it smell? Are you inside or outside? What do you see around you? What can you hear? Is there a taste in your mouth? Zoom in to those details.
Start Writing
Try starting with I remember or I don’t remember or I don’t know why I remember or even, I don’t know why I don’t remember.
A Short Story
My sister reminded me the other day of a moment she remembers.
We were in our teens and had gone into town, shopping. I’d bought the Live Aid single - oh yes, it was a long time ago. On our way home someone, in a rush to get to the bus, knocked into me. The impact snapped my new record clean in half. I don’t remember how I felt at that moment. My sister remembers feeling awful for me. When we got home I stuck the record together on the B-side with sellotape. The A-side then played beautifully.
