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The Orange-Peel Garnish: How Un-Telling Details Bring Characters to Life

About halfway into The Fugitive (1993), a team of US Marshals discovers the apartment where the titular fugitive, Richard Kimble, has been hiding out and, they soon learn, scheming to prove his innocence. The marshals find evidence of those schemes in the trash.

The scraps from making fake IDs—slivers of plastic, a razor blade, glue, paper clippings—are nestled at the bottom of a trash can, and they’re surrounded by the peeled, curling rinds of an orange.

Marshal Sam Gerard says, “We’re eating oranges and we’re making IDs.”

That line, aided by its deft use of first-person plural, its equally deft syntactic parallelism, and Tommy Lee Jones’s signature wry delivery, demonstrates a theory I’ve long held with regard to fiction: Telling details may illuminate characters, but they don’t animate them.

It’s the unimportant details, the un-telling ones, that bring characters to life.

In creative-writing workshops, book reviews, critical essays, how-to-sell-your-novel manuals, guest-author seminars, visiting-faculty lectures, conference symposiums, conference roundtables, conference happy hours, Twitter threads, Substack articles, Insta-whatevers, and Facebook “stories,” authors both aspiring and established are instructed to use telling details, which are exactly what they sound like. Ketchup on a character’s shirt tells us this character is slovenly. Blood on a character’s shirt tells us this character might be the murderer.

Telling details are unquestionably effective. They’re an important tool for any writer, as crucial to a well-honed narrative as sharp dialogue, vivid characterization, and lively, escalating conflict. But imagine reading a story or novel that only included telling details. Such relentless proficiency! It would be exhausting, that kind of book. That kind of book reminds the teacher they forgot to assign homework.

Untelling details, on the other hand, are the classroom cutup. They compensate for what they lack in plot or character insight by being memorable, interesting, unique, a literary inveiglement of that most versatile and dependable of marginalia, the checkmark.

Consider this passage from Elmore Leonard’s LaBrava, checkmarked in my tattered paperback:

The Dade-Metro squad-car cop, drinking Pepsi out of a paper cup, said, “He pulls the trigger, click. He pulls the fucking trigger and I come around like this, with the elbow, hard as I can. The piece goes off—no click this time—the fucking piece goes off and smokes the guy standing at the bar next to me with his hands up. We get him for attempted, we get him for second degree, both.” The Dade-Metro squad-car cop said, “Did you know you rub a plastic-coated paper cup like this on the inside of the windshield it sounds just like a cricket? Listen.”

What sets that passage apart? The crickets. In an anecdote about a guy getting shot and killed, the most exciting part is someone rubbing a cup against glass to make the sound of crickets. It’s a factoid, no different than something you’d read on a Snapple cap, but it’s memorable.

Although the passage lacks Leonard’s signature use of the present participle—“Man trying to keep his cool” instead of “The man was trying to keep his cool”—it’s full of valuable lessons in craft: omitting “that if” after “Did you know” to make the dialogue more cadenced and natural; the repetition of “Dade-Metro squad-car cop” reflecting what our interlocutor thinks about the person talking via free indirect style; and the tacit action of rubbing the cup against the windshield that’s tucked into that single word, “Listen.”

The memorability of the detail about the crickets stems from its juxtaposition. Taken on its own, the detail is mundane, remarkably unremarkable, but when it’s placed next to a brutal murder, it crackles with life. The detail creates verisimilitude. Few of us have witnessed a murder, but all of us have heard crickets chirping on a warm summer night.

Untelling details thrive in the crime genre for that reason. With The Fugitive, I would not be surprised if a studio exec had questioned the orange peels, asking for a line about, say, the oil in the peels helping the glue bind in an ID. That would be a reasonable suggestion, but it misses the point of why the oranges are so memorable.

We’ve all peeled and eaten an orange. Very few of us have made a fake ID.


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