(We are covering the elements of immersion, starting with verisimilitude; we started at sensory details, then covered emotion. This week, we’re gonna drift even further from sensory details, but it’s all in service of the same goal of immersing the reader!–Side note, I’m posting October and November posts on the 2-week schedule ahead of time, so I can clear the decks for NaNo WriMo.)
Opinion
At first glance, it might be strange to associate opinion with sensory details. In Western culture, we tend to think of opinion and facts as being opposites, and we tend to associate sensory details with “facts” rather than opinions.
Unfortunately, the perception of sensory details as being purely factual has two issues:
- Our memories are terrible at remembering facts!
- Sensory details written as “factual truths” are really boring and hard to read.
The distorting effects of memory are pretty well documented. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and studies have been done about whether people remember tragedies such as the bombings on September 11, 2001, accurately,* that is, basic details about where they were when they heard the news. People cannot remember even the most dramatic, meaningful events accurately over time, including where they were or who they were with.
This is because our memories are colored by our emotions and our opinions; if a memory reveals us as being not the kind of person we prefer to think of ourselves, accuracy flies out the window!
And we know this—about other people’s memories, if not necessarily our own.
We also know that our emotions and opinions can play tricks on our memories. Depression can make a good day seem bad in retrospect; a difficult day that ends on a high note can seem like a good day as we minimize the difficult elements.
You may also know someone who tells you that your memories aren’t accurate for reasons that have nothing to do with the facts–and everything to do with how they see the world. (And if so, you know how useless it is to argue with them, even when you have photographic evidence!)
This means that, in effect, sensory detail is never really without the distortion of emotion and opinion at some level—no matter how dry and dull the details may seem. The details that we remember are reinforced by emotion and opinion, even by the way we see the world.
This means that when someone gives a perfectly defined fact without emotion or opinion, we tend to discount it.
Here’s an example:
“The rainbow trout was five feet long.”
Infamously, the attempts of many fisherman to present their catch as larger than it really was are so rarely believed that there’s a name for it: telling a fish story.
When we hear bald statements of facts and details in real life, we often discount them, unless they are presented by someone we accept as an authority. For all other presenters of facts, we try to find the person’s motivation. We all have experience with liars who try to manipulate us by telling us something is factual when it is not; one of the first things liars will try to do (just watch any four-year-old) is tell you a lie, then tell you other lies to cover up the first lie, with each of the lies reflecting only the purest of motives, as when a preschooler tells you that they did not eat the cookie, but it was stolen by a monster that they chased away to save your life!
When we hear facts without opinions, we assume lies. Where is the rest of the story? Why are you telling me this?
When we hear facts colored by opinions, we feel like we have “figured out” the teller’s motives, and are more likely to believe what is being said. For example:
“I was jealous of my brother’s five-foot-long trout.”
Jealousy can make a fish story believable…sort of. When a point of view or other character states their opinion outright, then the reader’s brain approaches the information, once again, logically.
We may or may not accept that the trout is five feet long, but our acceptance is conditional. We are still awaiting evidence that the fish is really five feet long!
When someone says an opinion outright, we tend to question it. A friend of mine once tried to convince her co-workers that she didn’t like raspberries. They did not believe her, and told her that she just hadn’t tried the right raspberries; she had to try ripe raspberries and not supermarket ones; she was really just against the texture. They tried to convince her that she didn’t know her own taste buds!
But if she had described an incident where someone had surprised her by serving her something with hidden raspberries in it and she had gagged on the flavor and spit it out, they likely would have believed her.
We tend to believe in “the evidence of our senses.” And we also tend to believe others who present the evidence of their senses.
So let’s throw in some sensory details:
“The trout my brother caught was a loathsome five feet long, with bright, silvery scales touched with the colors of a rainbow, a fresh scent, and a shining, mocking eye that seemed to stare at me, calling me a failure.”
Later, if we find out the fish wasn’t exactly five feet long, we will probably acknowledge that we were fooled–that we wanted to be fooled, because the description of that fish was just so convincing.
We’ll be talking more about unreliable narrators later, but one of the main techniques in pulling one off is to have the narrator’s opinion be very strong and supported by a ton of details. The narrator’s opinion is wrong or they are lying (that’s what makes them unreliable), but what makes the book fun to read is the level of detail in the sensory, emotional, and opinion.
(If you want to study how to write details really well, look up “best books with unreliable narrators,” read the books, type in the openings, underline all the sensory, emotional, and opinion details, and ask, “How is this detail being used to deceive the reader?”
We will be talking more about how to write good opinion in Volume 4, Keeping the Reader Trapped In Your Story, but keep in mind for now that the power of verisimilitude depends on using sense details and not trying to approach descriptions from a factual, logical perspective.
The Sweet Spot of Verisimilitude
The sweet spot of verisimilitude—the perfect detail, if you will—is the overlap between sensory detail, opinion, and emotion.
If you want to drag a reader into your story, providing some of these “perfect details” is a great way to do it!
She was the kind of little kid who likes soft, homemade oatmeal cookies with cinnamon and sugar spinkled on top, who has a gap between her front teeth, whose hands are always sticky and dirty except for one thumb—the kind of kid who carried a blanket, not because it was expensive or pretty, but because it was soft.
Combining multiple senses—particularly non-visual ones—with emotion and opinion can drag a reader into the story very quickly. The reader might decide the story is not right for them, but they are forced to have to choose not to read further.
A story that is not immersive can be set aside lightly; a story that is immersive has to be put down strictly, lest it consume every available moment and keep you up at night.
*”How Accurate Are Memories of 9/11?” by Ingfei Chen in Scientific Americanonline, September 6, 2011. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/911-memory-accuracy/
(Next up: The Elements of Memory! Cool stuff indeed 🙂