Hi writers! Today’s prompt is all about that one telling detail. Make it do double duty, moving the story along while telling us something important about your main character.
Day 23 Prompt: “Choose a detail that only your character would notice in this story. “
I just started reading The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Welty is a master of the telling (and odd) detail. In “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,” an orphan girl who believes she is going to be married lovingly packs her “hope chest,” an old trunk she found somewhere, as the three women from her town who have taken charge of her try to ship her off by train to a home for the feeble-minded. Welty could just say it was an old trunk and leave it at that. She does this instead:
“The trunk was old and lined with yellow and brown paper, with an asterisk pattern showing in darker circles and rings. Mutely the ladies indicated to each other that they did not know where in the world it had come from. It was empty except for two bars of soap and a green washcloth, which Lily was not trying to arrange in the bottom.”
In this little glimpse we get a sense of the sad hopeless surrounding Lily, her wistfulness for normalcy, family traditions she knows others have, for something that belongs just to her. And we get a clearer picture of her mental state, as she arranges and rearranges the old soap and rag in the bottom of the trunk. The asterisk pattern seems utilitarian, almost masculine. This isn’t a young lady’s hope chest at all, but an object transformed by Lily’s imagination.