For the Love of it All, Be Specific! (Just Don’t Specify Everything!)
Writer: Paul Luikart
A story told only in generalities is automatically a bad story, even if the content is something to do with inherently exciting subject matter. An Old West gunfight, a steamy Parisian rendezvous, a midnight flight on a flimsy dirigible, et al. Due to the story’s presentation in only the broadest of terms, despite the cathartic or sordid content the storyteller holds in his mind at the outset, we, the attentive audience, never realize the intended effect. The storyteller has declined to share the morsels. His meanness is like that of a master distiller who whips up a batch of his finest stuff and then dumps it into the woods as we watch, dying of thirst. But at least the generalist storyteller has afforded us the mercy of brevity. “The two cowboys were mad at one another. So, they shot one another and died.” We, of one accord, may rightfully respond, “Thank God that’s over with,” and may therefore retire to some front porch to drink whiskey.
A story told in generalities is certainly insufferable, but a story in which every bit is constantly overly specified without regard to “good reasons” is just as boring as the story told only in generalities.
With the specifist storyteller, I might say that it is all an entirely different story. Please pardon the pun, but it was so obvious that not to make it would indicate a deficiency in my powers of observation so great that anybody reading this would immediately wonder if I actually possessed any observational powers at all. (If you do not pardon it, please know that it is not going anywhere and you will have to find some other way to make your peace. But I digress…) The specifist storyteller will place imagery and detail into the story via a kind of carpet-bombing campaign, lighting up not only the central character and his concerns, but, in the minutest detail, the wart upon the rump of the central character’s nephew’s next door neighbor’s pet rat, though the wart is a.) intrinsically uninteresting and b.) as far removed from the thrust of the story as the sins that God has removed are from the souls of the penitent. “The first cowboy, Bill Jones, a detestable drunk, who’d ridden from Las Cruces to Yuma on a crippled horse that he called ‘Stripe,’ and that was on account of the blaze running from the forelock to the soft, pink nostrils…” Oh, no. Tonight, it seems, we will never get to the whiskey.
For whatever work the storyteller must do to distill the story to its maximum proof, before all of that legwork, the storyteller will understand that she must cover light years in milliseconds. She must, on a particular day, harness the power of a particular sunbeam with a particular magnifying glass on a particular sidewalk, not to “fry tiny ants,” but to fry the one particular tiny ant whose fried state the rest of the entire story depends upon. Were that one exact ant not fried by the storyteller, there could be no story at all. Then, in the very next instant, she must be ready to remove herself to the vantage point of the Palomar telescope, a place from which she may see every square inch of the heavens and report upon them in only a word or two. So close! So far! So quickly!
The storyteller who correctly balances the generalities and specifics of the story, for any story worth telling is unavoidably comprised of both, is a storyteller in touch with herself and her reasons for telling the story in the first place. The “why” at the heart of the matter. It is in this that we, the audience, place our confidence as we prepare to listen. But it is no small accomplishment for the storyteller. It requires the perfect blend of observational stamina, patience, and practice. Plenty of the latter. Mostly the latter. Enough of it, I’d say, to fill an empty whiskey barrel.
About the Writer
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), and the Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021.) His work is included in 2019’s Best Microfiction anthology from Pelekinesis Press and he is the 2019 winner of the Nassau Review’s Writer Award in Prose. His MFA is from Seattle Pacific University. He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Website: pluikart2.wixsite.com/paulluikart