Remembering “A Leaf By Niggle”

Do I get lost in the details? Do I mind?

Writing is like breathing most days. Even editing is not hard most of the time. Where I have to push myself is when it’s a messy edit—inserting something near the beginning that will cause ripple effects through the whole work, or realizing that something that had happened at midday in an earlier draft must now be pushed to dusk and then everything after that either must happen in the dark or I need to push it to the next day and change my timeline for everything else.

But some days it’s not. Sometimes getting from the scene that I just finished to the next one is work. Each sentence in-between must be squeezed out, shaped, pondered and re-worked to make sure there aren’t too many or too few. They can’t be boring, but they often describe the mundane, which is good because they humanize the character and often give the breadth and depth that make them “real”. It takes time and thought and concentration to shape these mundane words, and those are all scarce resources.

In school one year, we read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “A Leaf By Niggle”. It was a revelation. A part of me that I’d always been frustrated with jumped up and shouted, “Ha!” Sometimes I get lost in the details. Especially when I try to clean or straighten. The whole kitchen is messy, but I’m in one corner getting everything there perfect until I run out of time for the rest. When we have guests coming, I set a recurring timer. Whenever it goes off I have to switch rooms. That way everything gets at least some attention.

Individual words can be like that sometimes. I get mired in the in-between searching for a word I can almost think of that would be just perfect there. Unfortunately, although my reading vocabulary is quite good, the store of words I can draw on to write is usually tiny. My memory is stingy with me. I’ve begun using “drafts” the we used to use “practice takes” when we were filming. “Don’t worry! The camera’s running so we can work out framing, but this is just a practice take,” we’d say. But if it was good, we’d keep it. Now I distract myself from my “perfect word” quests by saying, “Put something down as a placeholder. You can fix it in the next draft.” Sometimes I do fix it. (Thank you, online thesaurus!) Sometimes the placeholder turns out to be good enough.

Details are good. They can make or break a piece of art. They can also prevent you from creating art. Figuring out which is happening, and how to manage both, I think that’s part of the craft.