{"id":8429,"date":"2019-09-03T13:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T20:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=8429"},"modified":"2019-08-30T13:57:15","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T20:57:15","slug":"concrete-details","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/concrete-details\/","title":{"rendered":"Concrete Details"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

J.T. Bushnell wrote, \u201cI once burst into tears during a\nTobias Wolff reading . . . as Wolff intoned the final passages from \u2018Bullet in\nthe Brain,\u2019 I broke the silence of the packed auditorium with a gasp, a sob.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bushnell goes on to explain his strong emotional reaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was the final scene that set me off.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow\ngrass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the\nneighborhood gather for a pickup game. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHalf a page later, the story ends with the passage that\nbrought me to a fever pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows\nto lengthen on the field, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball,\ntime for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese passages by themselves seem innocuous enough. Each\noffers a series of descriptions, nothing more. But the conclusion I\u2019ve come to\nover the years is that the description is exactly what produced my reaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By description I mean the concrete, the things we can observe\nwith our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I do not mean simple\nadjectives. I do not mean descriptions such as \u2018The weather was glorious.\u2019\nGlory is an abstraction. The glorious is useless because it can\u2019t show us\nanything concrete. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can\u2019t show a white-hot sun perched overhead, or a sky so\nhard and blue that a fly ball might shatter it. It can\u2019t show a pitcher\u2019s\nshadow puddled under his cleats, or heat rising from the ground in shimmering corrugation.\nIt can\u2019t produce the smell of hot aluminum bleachers. It can\u2019t let you taste\nthe sweat on your lip when you go too long between slugs of cold beer. Only\nconcrete description can do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As novelist Richard Bausch advises,  . . .  a\ngood story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. .\n. . get rid of all those places where you are commenting on things, and let the\nthings stand for themselves. Be clear about the details that can be felt on the\nskin and in the nerves<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from \u201cThe Heart and the Eye, How Description Can Access Emotion\u201d by J.T. Bushnell, Jan\/Feb 2013 Poets & Writers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

J.T. Bushnell wrote, \u201cI once burst into tears during a Tobias Wolff reading . . . as Wolff intoned the final passages from \u2018Bullet in the Brain,\u2019 I broke the silence of the packed auditorium with a gasp, a sob.\u201d Bushnell goes on to explain his strong emotional reaction. \u201cIt was the final scene that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1201,1200],"class_list":["post-8429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotes-of-inspiration","tag-j-t-bushnell","tag-richard-bausch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-2bX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8432,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429\/revisions\/8432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}