Little whispers, big echoes

As I said in my first blog post, I consider the book I’m writing a tapestry of all my favourite parts of my favourite books with details that are significant to me woven in. By the way, I understand that this is a pretentious metaphor, but I’m leaning into the pretense in this blog (because otherwise I would have to disclaim every post that I write with “I’m aware that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”)

In this post, I want to explore the small details I’ve drawn from other media and my own sensory experiences—details that, to me, carry the echoes of much larger ideas.

From other media

One of the details I put in about the main antagonist of my book was that she eats flowers. She  adds them on top of the cakes she and June have for breakfast. However, June finds these flowers bitter and brushes them off the cake. 

“Good morning, June,” said Morana, holding a tray of purple flowers piled on a plate, a pot of honey, a pitcher of cream, and a stack of powdered cakes. [...]  She took a cake, topped it with honey and cream, and sprinkled some flowers on top. June followed suit and took a bite. The cake was delicious, but the flowers had a bitter aftertaste. June picked them off.

Rose the Hat, Dr Sleep

This small detail was inspired by the movie Dr. Sleep. In that movie, Rose (the villain) lures in a little girl named Violet by pulling a flower out of her hat. She then eats the flower, to which the girl protests “You don’t eat flowers!”

That detail just stuck with me because there’s something so creepily compelling about that act.

It was a detail I wanted to use because although it’s tiny, it has greater implications for the antagonist. In Dr. Sleep, Rose lures in children with charm and then consumes their ‘shine’. I wanted to give my villain the same aura: someone who both deceives with her beauty and consumes what is beautiful and is not meant to be eaten.

I included this detail not really as a reference that I expect anyone to recognize (although it’s totally fine if they do), but rather because it carries a strong, evocative meaning for me.

From life

Another example of a tiny detail I put in relates to the landscape. When June ventures deeper into an area that’s been corrupted by an outside influence, there is an unnatural change that overtakes the landscape.

One of the impacts of this becomes apparent when June is climbing a hill and hooks her arm around a tree to help pull herself up, but accidentally ends up pulling the tree over. 

The trees that had already been extracted left a loose scrabble of debris and pebbles, making it hard for June to find purchase in her overlarge boots. She therefore hooked her arm around the trunk of a tree to help pull herself up the hill. However, rather than providing stability, the tree began to teeter and then fall, the giant root system ripping easily out of the ground.

June jumped back instinctively, just barely avoiding the trunk and branches that came crashing down beside her, shaking the ground beneath her feet. She stook, stock-still, her heart hammering.

The trails behind my apartment.

I thought of this detail when I was hiking in the hills behind my apartment. They are mountain biking trails and can get pretty steep, and I’m used to trying to climb up or down the hilly, icy terrain without falling on my ass (a task at which I was NOT successful a couple days ago by the way). 

I often rely on the trees to help pull myself up or steady myself on the way down. I was walking in the woods while thinking about how to communicate the corruption of a forest, and while pulling myself up I was thinking how disorienting and frightening it would be if the tree didn’t act as an anchor but was easily pulled over. The idea that I was standing under trees that could crash down around me at any moment was very unsettling, so I decided to put it in to help describe the wrongness, the hollowing out, the perversion of the place.

In conclusion

With the inclusion of these details, I hope to accomplish two things. The first is adding texture to the story: giving the scene a feeling or colour. The second is to hint at something bigger, something that exists outside of that exact moment.

A woman eating flowers, a tree that cannot hold itself up—these are in a way insignificant details in the wider plot of the story. But I hope they create a feeling, a quiet sense of unease or recognition, even if the reader can’t immediately put their finger on why. And I believe the surest way to make those details resonate with a reader is to choose the ones that resonate with me—moments that unsettle, linger, or strike a chord deep enough to echo beyond the page.