Category: Prompts

In her book, Naked, Drunk and Writing, subtitle: Writing Essays and Memoirs For Love and for Money, Adair Lara talks about details.

“The terms ‘image’ and ‘detail’ are often used interchangeably. A concrete detail, for example, is said to be one that appeals to one of the five senses.”

“Details prove it happened. If you say you are late because you hit traffic, the boss may squint at you, but if you say some bozo in a Mini-Cooper tried to drive along the margin of the road on the Waldo Grade and hit a gravel truck, spilling rocks across the road and blocking all the lanes in both directions, you have a shot at being believed.”

Today’s prompt, from Naked, Drunk and Writing:

“Write a list of details from your childhood.” Being about the same age as Adair, my list contains items on her list: milk delivered in glass bottles, metal ice cube trays with levers, cap guns, hula-hoops.

My list also includes hair dryers with hoses attached to giant shower caps, empty and clean orange juice cans used as hair curlers, manual typewriters, carbon paper, white-out for typing errors.

“Select a memory from your childhood. What did you feel at the time of the event? Go through the senses of touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. Describe the colors you remember and how the event made you feel. What impact has this memory had on you? Invent the details you don’t remember.” (One of the things I love about Adair . . . her free spirit . . . her go-for-it attitude.)

Prompt: Write about a memory from childhood using detail (detail = things that can be seen, felt, heard, smelled, tasted).   Use information from Prompt #70 for pacing.

In Adair Lara‘s book, Naked, Drunk, and Writing, she talks about pace.

“Add more images where you want to slow us [the reader] down, fewer when you want to speed up. This is called pace.”

In a writing workshop, Adair said, “To slow down, give more detail, give unexpected detail, detail that moves story forward.”

Today’s writing prompt is either, or, or both.

Either take one of the story starts below (these are from Adair’s writing class) and keep writing, using detail to slow the story down or minimize detail to speed the story up.

As Adair writes in her book, “The more important a scene or character, the more image and detail it gets.”

OR: Have fun writing a scene with too much detail. Tell us way more than we need to know. Write a spoof on how to write too much detail.

Use any of these lines to get started:

I had to try something different so I . . .

All the time I was thinking that . . .

The turning point came when . . .

BOTH: Write using too much detail. Rewrite the same scene with much less detail.

Photo of a collection of a smallish grouping of a partial compendium of a few of the print books using the paper method of publishing that have been produced by proud and able and hard-working students of classes of the writing kind taught by the amazing Adair Lara.

Books published by Adair Lara’s students.