My favorites are the ones that reach out and speak to you. The universal truths, those things we've all lived through, or agree with, or fear, or are about the possible million other emotions we all know.
Nobody notices detail quite like @RebStead. Rebecca has a knack for finding the little observations about something that seems so insignificant but holds such truth. Here's a little taste from her brand new story, Liar and Spy,
"At our house, doing the garbage meant wheeling two big plastic bins out to the curb. I could take two at once, steering them in two directions around the crack on the broken concrete path and bringing them back together again on the other side. It's not as easy as it sounds. It's a big crack: I tripped over it when I was five and broke my front tooth. I imagine the new owners of the house hitting that crack on trash day, their cans tipping and their garbage going everywhere."
It's a detail that's so unmistakably familiar even if it's not our own. I never had a crack to steer garbage cans around. But there are other little things that make the house I grew up in "home." It's not just the crack in the driveway, it's developing the special talent of maneuvering around that crack with trash cans. It's a move that only somebody with experience has.
It's that kind of detail that makes me lay the open book across my chest and dive into my memory for my own examples. It's a detail, that even though I didn't bookmark, I knew exactly where in the story and even where on the page it was in the book.
My detail (and I'm sorry, I can't tell you exactly why it matters yet. You'll have to wait for the first day of school!) has to do with the summer camp I worked at for most of my life. We had these big concrete pavilions whose rafters were painted with the names of counselors dating back decades. There were no rules about who could paint their names up there. But, there was an unspoken system. You were asked by a senior counselor whose names was already painted. They were the ones who knew the stories behind the names. The older the year, the more the story resembled a tall-tale or a legend.
I hadn't thought about those rafters or their unwritten rules in years and years. Until this week. And I was so excited because it was a detail that was so unmistakably my camp. It reminded me just how special my camp was and how magical a place camp can be.
And just at that very moment my phone went off. It was a Facebook Notification from one of my close friends, whose name is most definitely in the rafters, posting this picture:
I couldn't believe it. Not only was the timing remarkable, but it is the best, most perfect picture of that exact detail.
If you can think of any details that makes a place more than just the stuff that there, write them down! They don't have to be long stories, just bullet points.
I don't know why I thought about these rafters when I did. But I can sure tell you this, there are hundreds of other great details and great stories about my camp that I'll never remember. I wish that I hadn't hated to write for all of those years. The stories I could tell.
*That's not true. It's not all about the right details. You need an interesting story, characters, and then there's the actual telling of the story. That's a whole different story. No pun intended. Okay, pun intended.
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