Welcome back to Graphically Minded, a (for now) entirely free every-other-Friday publication about writing and storytelling, relating the lessons I’ve learned in a 20-plus-year career as a comic book writer and author.
We’re going to circle back to the Dude and this very particular rug, but for now I want to take you to the mid 2000s, when I was fresh out of college and journalism school and writing for a newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It was chance that took me to Little Rock, a city of about 200,000 that is a blend of Ozark, Texas and Deep South. Not long after I took the job, I was assigned the “night cops” beat, which is as close to a hazing ritual as it goes at newspapers. It meant, simply, that I would be covering the crime beat during the night, which as it happens coincides with the period when most crimes happen.
My shift was from roughly 1-10 p.m. I started every day at the office by finding the day cops reporter, asking if anything was happening, and then taking the police scanner. This was a black device that looked like an oversized walkie-talkie. It had a dial at the top, which had been marked with Wite-Out to show the exact channels for police, sheriff and fire department. The scanner was my companion in the night as most of the other staff clocked out. I can still feel the brick-like weight of it in my hand. Hear the beeps and crackle as it came to life. I would cycle through stations, waiting for stuff to happen.
Stuff happened.
Most people don’t know this, but Little Rock has been one of the most violent cities in the country historically. Enough so that there was an HBO documentary about it. I covered dozens of homicides, even more robberies and assaults.
Through the police scanner, I heard the calls from dispatch at the same time as officers did. If it was something bad enough to merit a story, I ran down to my car, raced to the address and documented the carnage. One day there was a shooting in front of a Popeyes Chicken close to the office. I made it there before the police and sat down on the curb and interviewed the victim as blood ran from a bullet hole clean through his lower leg.
Maybe you’ve seen the movie Nightcrawler, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a TV news reporter who obsesses over documenting death and destruction. There’s a degree of that that comes into it. Your best days as a reporter, those days that you get a front page story, always comes at the expense of someone else. For me, it was too much. Too emotionally draining. I only lasted a couple of years.
So, there’s your backstory. Now, let’s focus on one particular day. I was at the office in the early morning for a rare day shift and the radio lit up. Tons of chatter back and forth between dispatch and officers, intensity in their voices. Something big. A car chase. One suspect. Racing through neighborhoods.
I got in my car and went, pursuing the pursuers. And then a voice came over. “He crashed. He crashed into a house.”
It was a slender street with a gentle curve, all homes and driveways, now choked with police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. The fleeing car had smashed through the brick side of a house, leaving a hole that looked like the Kool-Aid Guy made it.
I talked to the cops (no one hurt, mercifully), took notes on all that I could see, and then I noticed something. The whole neighborhood was out on the sidewalk, all of them having been getting ready for the day as the chase interrupted their lives. They were all dressed, ready for work and school. Except there was one group, most sitting on folding chairs set up in the bed of a pickup truck, still wearing pajamas. They hadn’t had the time, or the ability, to change clothes. They were the ones whose house had been shattered. Had to be.
I approached and asked if it was their house. A woman, about 50, said it was. I asked for their names and she told me. I asked if I could ask a few questions, and she said that would be fine.
I asked what she was doing at the time of the crash. She said she was getting her family ready for the day. I asked what room she was in. The kitchen. I asked if she was making breakfast. She was. I asked what she was cooking. She wasn’t cooking, she corrected. She was baking.
I asked what she was baking. Muffins, she said. And I could tell at that point that this woman had had a traumatic morning, and her patience with me, with the world, was running thin. Yet, I had one more question.
I asked what kind of muffins she was baking.
They were blueberry muffins.
I thanked her and left, and then went back to write my story. And it began with that woman, wearing her pink nightgown, in her kitchen, baking blueberry muffins, when a man in a car exploded through the side of her house.
So, the question: Why did I keep pestering this lady? Was it so important to know this tiny detail about the blueberry muffins? In the grand scheme of life, certainly not. But for the story of that moment, absolutely yes.
When our audience read that story, they were able to be right there in her kitchen. To smell that aroma of warm blueberry muffins that you might very well have in your own head right now. To feel that space, and then understand how jarring the sudden violence was. Readers could connect. And that, I’ve always felt, is our primary task.
This is often described in terms of that old adage, “show, don’t tell.” Which is great advice. But there’s another side of it, which is that too much detail will bog down your writing and storytelling. There’s a famous anecdote in comics about the script for From Hell by Alan Moore, that a single panel had a full page of prose brimming with flowery language. When artist Eddie Campbell received the script, he took out a pen and crossed out everything except “night” “beneath a streetlight” and “prostitute.”
Your goal isn’t to provide every detail. Your goal is to understand the important ones. And the way you discern between the two is by considering this question: Does this detail say something about the character? As an exercise, think about the details that say something about you. Or watch a movie or show and look for the telling details (or lack thereof).
That brings us back to the Dude and “The Big Lebowski.” In many ways, he’s a cipher of a character. But I think we learn so much about him because of that rug. As loose as he acts, he’s a man that craves consistency and comfort. He has exact habits and tastes. And while he has no ambition, he does have a code. You don’t piss on a man’s rug.
Now, there’s a little thing I did in this piece that maybe you noticed, maybe not. If you go back up to the third paragraph, look at how I described the police scanner. I was treating it like a telling detail, explaining the feel and sound and look of it with a degree of richness to show how important it was to the story. And how, for that period of my life, it defined me.
As always, I hope this is helpful to you as you write and tell stories. If you’d like to learn more about me and my writing, please visit vanjensen.com. Comments or questions? Please share them below. See you in a couple of weeks.
Really enjoyed this one! I agree about providing the right level of details really helps the reader connect.