Not all that you can express deserves a place in your story. That museum stop on a long tour, or the playlist-creating for a breakup, it all really happened, of course. They haven’t earned their keep just because you can remember them well. The everyday event, the droll habit, the mundane action, they all need something more. You supply the meaning behind each of these. Details can help out, too.
Memory is grand, the keeper of meaning about the self. Virginia Woolf said the self “is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative, stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.”
Treasure your beads, and make them shiny. Words are all we have to translate one consciousness to another. Without them, you will never know what blue looks like to me, nor I what a fever feels like to you.
You might be able to infuse some meaning into something as ordinary as using coffee creamer faithfully. It’s the faithful part of the experience that makes readers lean in. Yes, your character indeed used the same amount and the same brand of creamer every day. Help the readers see why, using detail to comprehend the unique aspect of the ritual. We all strive to lift our memories into the realm of meaning, going beyond reporting the banal to make using creamer a fresh insight.
You can imagine this. Does your character use three half-and-half creamers and stack the empties one within another? That says something more original. They might calculate the calorie count on an app. They use less than a full creamer. On and on, until maybe they’re sitting at a table and there’s just one half and half for two drinkers, and your character gives it to their partner.
Your writing can also make a place for the everyday event, taking the actions beyond the timeworn and prosaic, if you’re devoted to the lyrical nature of language. Imagine something that works as a metaphor — for example, like how starting a book can be like pulling the first napkin from an overstuffed dispenser. Or vice versa, where starting a poem is like teasing off the first sheet on a new toilet paper roll.
Keep yourself on watch for how often you need to lean on such lyrics. When the book’s reason for existence is to display leaps of language, the novel, story collection, or creative nonfiction is striving to be literary. Books considered literary are beloved. They also surface after many drafts of revision. They can be tricky to sell, but publishing them feels like a point of pride. Hackneyed publishers will tell you that you can’t eat your pride, so matter how savory it smells.
