Category Archives: Telling Detail

Round Up at the Montana Writers Rodeo

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by Debbie Burke

In May, my pardner in crime Leslie Budewitz and I saddled up her trusty Subaru and hit the dusty trail. Our destination: the 2026 Montana Writers Rodeo in Helena where we were both speaking.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about this fun boutique conference and was delighted to reconnect this year with director Mindy Peltier, founder Pamela Mencher, and chief wrangler Pearl Allen.

Because the conference is affiliated with the Helena Avenue Theatre (HAT), it welcomes the drama community and playwrights. During the weekend, in addition to craft presentations, actors performed scenes from plays written by members.

The Rodeo also encourages young writers. Friday evening, we were treated to imaginative short works read by three authors in middle and high school. I recognized a young man who’d also been at the event in 2024. Afterward I talked with them and expressed admiration for their bravery, standing onstage and baring their souls in front of an audience of strangers. I could never have done that at their age.

On Saturday morning, the kids were back, listening attentively. They asked questions that kept me and other speakers on our toes.

Mindy Peltier, MT Writers Rodeo Chair

Meet conference director/whirlwind Mindy Peltier. After raising and homeschooling six kids, Mindy knows how to cheerlead. On Friday afternoon, she kicked off the conference by encouraging attendees to become involved with a critique group or writing community. Improvement happens by learning new skills and hearing feedback from others. Critique groups offer objectivity, suggestions, and fresh viewpoints the author may not have considered. They foster creativity along with accountability. Perhaps more importantly, close groups not only help writing, they become a supportive family.

 

An unexpected highlight was speaker Allison Whitmer, Montana Film Commissioner. Working for the Department of Commerce, Allison’s big score was lassoing the Taylor Sheridan series Yellowstone, filmed in Montana. The franchise has brought multi-millions to the state in tourism, jobs, and production.

As film commissioner, Allison arranges everything from livestock to locally sourced food and cooks to prepare meals for cast and crew. Need lodging? She finds hotels, B&Bs, and homes to rent. How about extras, sound techs, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and other tradespeople? She’s got ’em.

Want to film on state or federal land? She facilitates permits and also negotiates with private owners for use of their property.

Need money to make a film? In April, the Big Sky Film Grant awarded $970,000 to 22 different projects from shorts to feature-length movies and TV programs. Productions are expected to spend more than $13 million in local rural communities.

At the Friday evening buffet, I chatted with Allison about her fascinating job. She is a writer herself and helps creatives and nonprofit groups like HAT and the Montana Writers Rodeo bring their events to life. Wonder if she needs an assistant?

(BTW, the buffet desserts featured tiny typewriters made from peanut butter, Mindy’s fun, tasty touch.)

Leslie Budewitz

Leslie Budewitz‘s keynote included surprises I’d never known despite being friends for more than 25 years. Although she’s published 19 books and won three Agatha awards, I learned she once doubted her own creativity. While she has great abilities in organization, research, and planning, she didn’t think she was creative, believing “creative women wore long flowy things with scarves and beads and complicated earrings,” not Levis and cowboy boots.

“I’d put unnecessary limitations on my concept of creativity,” she explained. “I suspect many of you have done the same thing.” Then she heard a talk by Professor Gerard Puccio that revised her thinking.

She compared two artists, Norman Rockwell and Pablo Picasso, who expressed creativity in vastly different ways. She encouraged the audience to embrace their unique individuality without limiting themselves by thinking I could never do that.

Authors often experience “What if I suck” days and Leslie reassured the audience that’s normal and expected for creative people. To help get past those discouraging days, she recommends becoming part of an active writing group. She credits involvement with the writing community as a major contributor to her success and opportunities.

Playwright/director/college instructor Ross Peter Nelson presented an entertaining workshop on dialogue writing skills with illustrations and audience participation. He projected excerpts from several plays on the screen and had audience members take turns reading a few lines. This exercise demonstrated how different tone, attitudes, accents, and subtext add to the richness of dialogue. On Saturday evening, a scene from one of Ross’s many plays was performed onstage by actors.

Award-winning speculative fiction author Kim Vandel spoke about techniques to create “suspension of disbelief” for readers. To write convincingly about sci-fi/fantasy characters and situations, she recommends using the five senses that readers can identify with. She employs the “Iceberg Principle of Worldbuilding” to reveal significant, specific details about the fantasy universe rather than overwhelming amounts of description. She also talked about the importance of emotion and awareness of brain chemistry to keep readers engaged.

Kim opened my eyes to the varied universe of speculative fiction with this slide:

Spec fiction genres courtesy of Kim Vandel

My talk was “The Hero’s Journey vs. the Villain’s Journey-How They’re Different Yet Alike.” In the slide show, I used film examples to compare and contrast two journeys: Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Michael Corleone from The Godfather trilogy. The audience asked challenging questions and seemed to like the presentation because they bought all The Villain’s Journey paperbacks, plus a number of my thrillers. I was glad to take home a lighter load of books than I’d brought.

Jim Bell’s ears should have been burning during the conference because his name came up repeatedly. During the panel discussion with all speakers, most of us said we own his books and recommend them to improve craft skills.

May snow on roof outside my window

 

Mindy hosted Leslie, Kim, and me at her lovely log home in the forest. Sunday morning, I woke to a skiff of snow on the roof outside my bedroom window.

Even though May 17th is supposed to be well into spring, Montana weather never pays attention to the calendar.

 

 

 

Sunday breakfast with Kim, Scott, Leslie, and Mindy

Mindy’s husband Scott treated us to a delicious breakfast of bacon and eggs and wonderful espresso coffee. The Peltiers deserve five stars on Yelp for gracious hospitality.

Reconnecting with friends and meeting new writers made the Rodeo weekend enjoyable, educational, and inspiring.

I especially appreciated that Leslie drove the entire 400-mile round trip. Thankfully the roads were mostly clear except occasional sleet and rain, often with sun shining through clouds at the same time. That’s springtime in the Rockies.

 

Extra bonus: We brainstormed during the journey and Leslie came up with a solution to a legal quandary in my WIP!

All in all, a fun and successful roundup!

~~~

TKZers: Any boutique writing conferences you’d like to recommend?

~~~

 

Want to build a fascinating villain or antagonist? Contact me at this link about upcoming zoom workshops. And read The Villain’s Journey – How to Create Villains Readers Love to Hate.

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How to Describe Characters

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I was reading a mystery the other day and noticed something—myself, pondering. I’d just read a passage describing a character. I shan’t print the actual prose, but here’s something I made up to give you the idea:

She wore a dress the color of jade. A platinum chain, deceptively thin on her smooth neck, held a diamond pendant. She had a sleek gold watch on her wrist, stacked against an array of jangling bracelets. Even her stiletto pumps whispered of indulgence and private fittings.

A couple of paragraphs later my brain sent me a message: Hey, I don’t remember a single thing she was wearing.

Which got me to thinking about what kind, and how many, physical details one should include. And my first thought is that one telling detail is much more powerful than a list. Consider this passage from The Godwulf Manuscript, a Spenser novel from Robert B. Parker:

Bradley W. Forbes, the president, was prosperously heavy—reddish face; thick, longish, white hair; heavy white eyebrows. He was wearing a brown pinstriped custom tailored three-piece suit with a gold Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold watch chain stretched across his successful middle. His shirt was yellow broadcloth and his blue and yellow striped red tie spilled out over the top of his vest.

This, IMO, is too much. And I was tripped up by broadcloth. What the heck is broadcloth? All those colors—red, white, gold. And what does “blue and yellow striped red” look like?

Here’s a better mix from The Americans by John Jakes. Carter Kent is a student at Harvard in the 1880s. Rebellious in nature, Carter got on the wrong side of his German professor.

In Carter’s opinion the man belonged in the Prussian army, not in a classroom. His curly blonde hair lay over his forehead in damp, effeminate ringlets. He had protruding blue eyes, and a superior manner, and loved to strut in front of his classes with a gold-knobbed cane in hand. He issued study instructions as if they were military orders, emphasizing them by whacking the cane on the desk.

Here damp, effeminate ringlets is striking. The gold-knobbed cane also. But here we have Carter’s impression of the man. Prussian army … military orders. And an action— whacking desks. That latter picture is one that sticks most in my mind.

Now let’s look at three character descriptions from the first page of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. It is, of course, in the POV of Philip Marlowe:

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

Notice there’s one telling detail—bone white. That’s striking, and that’s enough. The rest of the description is the impression the character’s looks make on Marlowe.

There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulder she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn’t quite. Nothing can.

Two specific details here—dark red hair and a blue mink—and both of them are wrapped up inside Marlowe’s impression. Here is a rich woman who doesn’t seem to care about the drunken Lennox (…distant smile…)

The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.

Detail: white coat with red stitching. But the impression is what stays with us. I know what Marlowe means by a “usual half-tough character.”

Chandler then goes on to use both dialogue and action to augment the descriptions. Dialogue for the half-tough guy:

“Look, mister,” he said with an edge to his voice, “would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg into the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?”

Action for the woman:

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

Finally, if you’ve got a character with a definite voice (and you should!) you can often capture the reader with just one line. Here again is the great Chandler:

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. (Farewell, My Lovely)

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. (The High Window)

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. (The Little Sister)

Redoing the description that kicked off this post, perhaps:

A platinum chain, deceptively thin on her smooth neck, held a diamond pendant. I smelled trouble. Or was that her perfume?

Suggestions (not rules…ahem):

  1. Don’t give us a list. Look for that one, telling detail.
  2. Consider using an impression from the POV character.
  3. Augment the description with dialogue and action.
  4. Use the voice for all its worth.

Over to you now. As I sit here in my faded sweatpants the color of an old gray mare, and my L.A. Rams T-shirt with a hole in the left armpit, I wonder: Do you have the same reaction to lists of details (i.e., forgetting them almost immediately)? What is your approach to character description?

The Power of the Telling Detail

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Raymond Carver (via Wikimedia Commons)

In last week’s post, I was asked what I learned from Raymond Carver when I took his workshop in college. The experience was not a happy one. It wasn’t because of Carver; it was because I wasn’t able to “get it.” That’s probably because it was not a craft class, but a place where you shared your work and got comments from Carver and the other students. I got lousy comments. That’s because I was trying to write like Hemingway and falling well short.

Meanwhile, I’d read some Carver stories and knew there was something there, but couldn’t figure out how to get it in my own writing. It wasn’t until years later, when I went back to read Carver and Hemingway again, that I saw it—they were both masters of the telling detail.

A telling detail is a descriptive element that powerfully illuminates a character, moment, or setting. One well-placed, well-formed detail deepens a story, pulling the reader further in, in a way that seems effortless.

In Carver’s story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” a husband and wife are having an intense conversation in the kitchen. The wife is reluctantly going over details of what happened at a party years ago, when another man took her for a ride in his car and kissed her. The husband’s reaction as he listens:

He moved all his attention onto one of the tiny black coaches in the tablecloth. Four tiny white prancing horses pulled each one of the black coaches and the figure driving the horses had his arms up and wore a tall hat, and suitcases were strapped down atop the coach, and what looked like a kerosene lamp hung from the side, and if he were listening at all it was from inside the black coach.

What is going on inside the husband is revealed in the pictures he notices and how he relates to them. He’s withdrawing from the argument; he’s escaping his emotions; he’s being driven from away from his marriage; he’s longing to be in some distant past. There is no need for Carver to tell us how the husband feels. The details do the “telling.”

In Hemingway’s “Soldiers Home” there’s a detail I’ve never forgotten (and I first read it in high school). A young man, Krebs, has returned home from World War I. His mother has just made him breakfast. But things are not the same for Krebs, and never will be again. The war has taken its toll.

His mother starts going on and on about how worried she is about him, how he doesn’t seem to have any ambition and so on. After her emotional appeal, Hemingway writes:

Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.

That detail is so much more powerful than telling us what Krebs feels. It works on us viscerally.

So how can you get a telling detail into your own writing?

First, you can net them when they fly up, unannounced, as you write. That could be your writers mind trying to tell you something important about the character or the place or the moment. So ponder it a moment. If it seems apt, work it into your scene.

Or you can craft the detail later. This is best done during revision. You have your entire story now. You know what’s going on inside the characters. You can go back into your scenes and sharpen the details to serve your overall purpose.

Try this:

  1. Identify a highly charged moment in your book.
  2. Make a list of possible actions, gestures or setting descriptions that might reflect upon the scene.
  3. List at least 10 possibilities, as fast as you can. Go deep. The best way to get good ideas is to come up with lots of them, let them cool a bit, then choose the best one. Look for the detail that surprises you the most, awakens a different part of the moment for you.
  4. Write a long paragraph incorporating that detail, then edit the paragraph so that it is lean and potent. The telling detail works best when it is subtle and does the heavy lifting all by itself.

Carpe Typem!