Santa, what are your eyebrows doing? Telling Details, Christmas Parties and Taco Bell Smells.

The Magic of The Eyebrow and Telling Details

What is this thing? This telling detail?

It’s a phrase or an image or a word that illustrates something about a character. It’s pretty exact. It’s a magical moment of showing rather than telling.

It’s usually pretty short.

And it’s the opposite of a telling description.

Here’s a bad description:

He was nervous and scared and sad all at once.

Here’s a telling-detail description:

He soothed himself, rubbing the tips of his own ears over and over.

Telling details make the characters and settings feel real. If we say, “Shaun lifted his eyebrows?” Well, that’s a cliché, but also it’s not quite enough to be a telling detail no matter how much people communicate with their eyebrows.

Here’s a bad description:

They walked into an almost empty bar.

We don’t really see the bar, do we?

Here’s something a bit better:

The bar smelled of beer and lilac bushes somehow. The Sonos speaker tottering on the edge of the reclaimed wood bar blared “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. A man leaning between ferns used a pencil to smash a hole into the bottom of a Bud Lite can and chugged it all down. He crushed the empty can between his hands and belched out the alphabet to cheers.

“Wow. This place is weird,” I said and grabbed the door handle, ready to bolt.

Writing Tip of the Pod

When you’re revising think, “Can I make this shorter? Tighter? Quirkier? More authentic?”

Dog Tip for Life

Notice the eyebrows. The difference. The details. And use them in your stories.

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The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

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