The Telling Detail Is the Olive in Your Martini

Recently I learned that you don’t “make” a martini, you “build” it. That got me thinking. How do you build a story? The ingredients for martinis and stories are not that different.

(How to Give Gentle and Helpful Feedback to Writers.)

Both stories and cocktails have their basic and essential elements. These might be plot elements that slot the story into a genre like romance or Western. They might be types of characters or tropes that are neither genre-specific nor entirely original. They could be structural elements or the very language we use.

Drinks also have classic ingredients that tell us what kind of drink they are. A martini is dry vermouth plus gin or vodka. You chill it in ice and then pour it into a glass. Variations and additions exist, but these essential elements tell us it’s a martini, as opposed to, say, a fuzzy navel. A martini should be stirred, not shaken. Unless it’s shaken instead of stirred.

On top of this basic mix comes the garnish. The garnish is an olive. Or three olives. Usually speared on a toothpick.

Or it’s a lemon peel. Often the peel is rubbed around the rim of the glass and then dropped in the drink.

One garnish makes the drink a little salty. The other gives it a citrus kick. Same drink, two different garnishes.

The Telling Detail

These garnishes are the telling detail of the martini. The choice of one or the other (or neither!) changes how the drinker experiences the drink. The same is true in how we describe people, places, and things in our writing.

Here are four examples from published works that show how the telling detail brings characters and settings to life:

“And when they came to a halt, it was outside an office building that had been completed so recently it probably didn’t even have a vermin problem yet.” –The Turnglass, Gareth Rubin

This detail of the absence of vermin tells us about the building in question, while also contrasting it against the norm in this setting.

“Rocks clattered under their feet and under their hands, for they had to clamber.” –The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin

Through the sensory detail of “clattered,” we feel and hear what the main character feels and hears. Not only that, but we see them moving through the landscape, and we simultaneously learn how this particular landscape differs from where the characters were before.

“Leonard, a graduate student, studied English at Georgetown, closing books and then mounting them on his bookcase as if in a display of difficult prey bagged.” –”Garden” in Three Thousand Dollars, David Lipsky

This apparently simple detail is a goldmine. The “as if” imagery tells us a lot about the character’s achievement mindset. The detail that Leonard has a bookcase where he keeps all his books (rather than, say, selling them to recoup costs) shows that he has enough money to engage comfortably with his studies. The fact that he displays his books shows that he enjoys airing his accomplishments to other people, or perhaps that he likes to look back on what he has accomplished. The simile contrasts his intellectual achievements with a more physical, traditionally masculine activity (hunting).

“I take inventory of the room. No window, a side table, one door. No other furnishings. This isn’t a standard hospital room. Maybe government.” –Havelock, Andrew Buckley

The telling detail in this example is the absence of things one might normally find in a hospital room. That absence is what tells the narrator, and the reader, that this isn’t a normal hospital.

The telling detail contains more than a simple description. It makes your character or setting specific and vivid. It tells us something significant, which is why it’s called the telling detail (in case you hadn’t figured that out yet).

The more specific your detail, the more it will bring your story to life. The best ones are those that carry layers of meaning. Just like the olive and the lemon peel, the right detail can elevate each story moment in exactly the right way.