Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Bringing Characters to Life: Details that Count

When you create characters in your memoir, look for details from the lives of those people that are vivid and sensual–something you can touch, see, hear, smell, or taste. These must be well-chosen details that speak loudly for who each person is, details that say more than their surface appearance. There will be a kind of resonance that emanates from the collective weight of the details you choose, whether they be details of how a person looks, the words he uses, or the actions that fill his life. You can't tell everything, so the details you select must paint with just a few strokes, the essence of the person's personality.

For example, say you want to write about your grandmother. Well, you can simply give her a name and say you loved her, or you can tell readers she perched on a stool at the end of the counter in her kitchen sneaking Salem cigarettes when she thought no one was looking, that she heated her house with her gas stove and all the wallpaper was discolored because of it, that she stood barely five feet tall but laughed like a linebacker, that she drank Scotch and Squirt, that when she was twenty she danced late at night and called herself a flapper, and that when she married your grandfather she carried in her pocket a tiny gold porcelain shoe. She had no needlepoint hobbies; she didn't work in a garden, didn't sew or paint china, but she loved to cook. Her white sauce was admired around town. (She used it as the base for every recipe, it seemed.) When she got angry she closed her mouth in a tight little line and refused to say mean things about anyone. Her favorite words were: "Tell me more…."

These are details that count, details that when pulled together define a life. They crack open the essence of who the person is.

In a short memoir you might simply tell one memory about a person and an event you two lived. You¹d pull out all of these kinds of defining details to bring your character to life.