Larry M. Coleman

Let’s take a look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

There are a thousand details in this, most of them bound to be missed. You could spend an entire day looking at this and still not get them all. Most of those details will be invisible, but all of them are important.

The reason the unseen ones are still crucial is because what one visitor misses, another will notice, even though they’ll miss ones the other visitor saw. It’s not any specific detail that makes this one of the most visited places on the planet, it’s the effect they all have together.

This applies to your writing, too, and I’ll use an example from my own work to illustrate it. It comes from “Threads,” the poem I talked about in No Writing is Ever a Waste. The detail I want to zoom in on is in the second stanza:

His huge beloved bookcase–
Well worn, wood oak–
Was meticulous and bountiful:
The heart of the house
And just as well guarded.

Why “wood oak” instead of “oak wood?” In other words, why isn’t the line the more natural, “Well worn oak wood?”

There are two answers, one obvious and the other so subtle it will never be noticed. The first one has to do with sonic structure: flipping the wood puts three ws in a row for alliterative purposes.

The second one, however, is complex. Although this poem is written in the first person, the “I” in the poem is not me. (If every time you write something in the first person it’s about you, work harder.) I am a man of fifty, but the “I” in the poem is a woman in her early thirties. More specifically, she is a woman who was born in France and lived there until she was eight. Although she learned English alongside French and has lived in the United States ever since, she considers her native language to be French. (I don’t build a huge character backstory for every small poem; the “I” here is Eileen.)

If you have studied Romance languages, you know that adjectives tend to come after the noun, which is the opposite of English—”black cat” versus “chat noir.” This poem is a reverie inspired by her coming home for the holidays and realizing she has a girl of her own who is now the same age she was when her father started letting her loot his bookcase. This pleasant flashback takes her back to her first year in that home, which is also her first year in the US, and it also sweeps her back to a time when putting the adjective after the noun: bois [wood] de chêne [oak]. It’s echoed again two lines later in “The heart of the house” instead of “The house’s heart” (which is a stronger alliteration this time around) because French doesn’t have a ‘s construction; it builds possessives in the form “the X of the Y.”

It took more words to describe half a line in this poem than the poem is long. That’s okay with me; in fact, it’s more than okay because that detail isn’t supposed to be noticed, it’s supposed to contribute in the background. Put that level of work into your own writing. It will show, even if no one but you knows it’s there.