/lit/ - Literature

Decide to re-read Anna Karenina and take notes - in a separate notebook - of every single detail that Tolstoy writes. The aim is to learn how to give scenes, thoughs, dialogue and inner monologues a sense of reality. Start reading and underlining the micro-details and quickly realize that Tolstoy uses swarms of microscopic particularities to paint every single bit of his works: from the locks of hair of Anna to the wide hips of a Tartar waiter to the sounds and smells inside a train to the fact that Vrónski went out of the train in a station to drink a glass of soda to the way that such character walks and that character moves his lips and etc and etc.

Realize that I am underlining and dog-earing practically every single page. Realize that in the same way that Shakespeare piles up one beautiful and extremely original metaphor upon other, without time for the mind to breath, Tolstoy constantly presents, one incessantly, one after another, thousands of small details, most of them true to life and based on careful observation.

Those details even bring small character to life. In one part of Anna Karenina Tolstoy describes how the porter of a big house from one of the rich ladies of Petersburg sits in his security cabin, in front of a glass that is in front of the street, and how he reads the newspapers every day, in front of the passerby’s, thinking that with this example he is helping them in their personal edification.

It’s a small detail about a character that is not going to appear again, yet now he is a human being, not simply "the porter", as most novels would describe him. To really pay attention to such small perceptions, and to remember them when you sit down to write, and to know what detail to use here and what to use there… That’s extremely difficult.

Is far more easier to write a Pynchon like "poetic prose" than to come up with this forest of little touches, and the same can be said of Shakespeare: it’s obscenely difficult to invent one beautiful and original metaphor after another, constantly, making language a great web of micro-histories (for every metaphor is a small capsule of a history).

(cont)