Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude - the appearance of being true or real, as in "the detail gives the novel some verisimilitude" (definition from Oxford Languages)

Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading Robert Parker's detective series, and the more I read the stories that Parker has written about Spenser, the more impressed I am with the amount of details that he includes in the stories.

All of these details give the narrative its texture and its uncanny resemblance to reality. 

Wall colors, cracks in sidewalks, the contents of a room--these kinds of details give a reader confidence in an author's ability to see the world with accuracy and let the reader trust him as a narrator.

Here are three examples from A Savage Place, the Parker novel that I'm reading now:

1) The office was on the first floor and had a little bay window framed with gray drapes that looked out onto Sunset and people on the sidewalk. There were several autographed pictures of actors on the wall and a bookcase liquor-cabinet-stereo set up along one side of the room. Besides a desk with two phones there were two more of the leather-and-wood sitting room chairs. Zeke was behind his desk, we sat in the chairs. The walls were pale gray, the rug was charcoal.

2) We went to The Palm on Santa Monica. The walls were covered with clumsy murals of show-biz celebrities in caricature. But my plate was covered with medium-rare butterflied lamb chops and asparagus with hollandaise.

3) Oceania Industries had executive offices high up in one of the towers. The waiting room had large oil paintings of Oceania's various enterprises: oil rigs, something that I took for a gypsum mine, a scene from a recent Summit picture, a long stand of huge pines. On the end tables were copies of the annual report and the several house organs from the various divisions. They had titles like Gypsum Jottings and Timber Talk.

There was no one in the reception room except a woman at a huge semicircular reception desk. Her fingernails were painted silver. She looked like Nina Foch. 

Unlike the newspaper editor, who told me years ago when I was starting out as a reporter not to report on the color of the walls in the borough hall, Parker would have told me just the opposite. 

Give your reader the color of the walls, the arrangement of furniture, the number of windows, the way the paint has been brushed on the ceiling, the type of soda machines in the lobby, the number of stairs to the second floor, the wood used to make the doors to the offices, the signs on the doors. 

Parker's eye is like a vacuum cleaner. He inhales these kinds of details so his pen can put them on the page. He sees everything. 

So, how can you practice "seeing" this way? 

What if you keep a notebook with you wherever you go and write down what you see, say, the next time you are at the train station or in the supermarket or sitting at church or walking your dog in the park? 

What is the color of the walls? How many windows are there in the room? How would you describe the shape of a roof? What kind of benches are in the park?

Try it. What have you got to lose? 

See if adding these kinds of details to your story can help give your narrative a greater sense of verisimilitude, heightening your reader's sense of reality and his or her trust in you as a narrator. 

And if you're willing to share some of your favorite details from a book that you're reading now, perhaps you'll leave them in the comments for us to study, too?

The Telling Detail

When I started out as a reporter on a local newspaper, I was asked to cover town council meetings. Before I left the office for my first assignment, my editor took me aside and gave me few words of advice.

“I’m not interested in the color of the walls,” she said, a warning tone in her voice. “I don’t want to know if the wall’s yellow or blue. Just give me the facts.”

Her warning has stayed with me for years, and I was reminded of it—and the wrong-headedness of it when it comes to writing fiction—when I picked up Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the other day.

Here’s what I found in the first chapter: 

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the Opera houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of wooly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembling the floral pen wipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbanks far-off prodigies. 

Imagine what my editor might have said to Edith Wharton if she had brought back this description to the newsroom from a visit to New York’s Academy of Music, the setting of the first chapter, where Newland Archer, one of the story’s main characters, makes his entrance.

It’s easy to understand, of course, why my editor might have worried about my reporting skills. A novice, I’d found the job straight out of college, where I’d taken as many literature classes as I could fit into my schedule. I’d never attended a town council meeting before, didn’t have a clue what to look for, and very well might have come back to the office with a description of the walls.

So, it was probably excellent advice to give a young reporter setting out on his first assignment. A newspaper story isn’t about the color of the walls, afterall, unless it’s a story about painting or architecture or interior design.

But the color of the walls may be the telling detail that you need to persuade your reader of the wealth or poverty of a particular character, or a certain character’s taste or mood or disposition. A yellow wall might very well convey a character's sunny personality, a family's optimistic view of the world, a narrator's perspective leaning toward light and hope rather than darkness and despair.

Here, for example, is another brief excerpt—imagine the look on my editor’s face if I’d brought back this description—from Chapter Three: 

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses’), one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d’or), seeing from afar the many-candled lusters reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. 

The next time that you're reading a book, whether it’s a classic or a contemporary novel, notice the details that the author includes and decide whether these details are extraneous (as my news editor felt about walls) or integral to the story.

Take another look at Wharton’s paragraphs above. They may appear a bit overwritten, but are they? What meaning might Wharton have tried to convey to her readers in the selection of such words, the detailed descriptions of such settings?