How Much?

“How much time do I need to spend describing the Holocaust—the horrendous conditions of the trains, the camps, etc…? Someone told me not to, because everyone knows it already. But also, it was 81 years ago.”

One of my students, who is writing about growing up as the child of two Holocaust survivors, asked this recently, and it occurred to me it’s a question most writers wrestle with at some point.

Not with how much Holocaust history to get into, of course. But how much to describe or explain when your story covers events, settings, or concepts that are so historic, or universal, they’ve already been well covered?

You don’t want to author-splain to your readers, “A hospital is a big building, with patients…”

But also, you should not assume that everyone has watched Schindler’s List, (or Airplane!).

You want to describe it just enough that the reader can see your characters living in, or with, it. And those descriptions should be angled toward your characters and the story, rather than informing the readers about it.

For example, in his novel The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter reminds readers about living through the Great Recession by having his middle-aged protagonist Matt get stoned with a couple of 20-somethings he met outside a 7/11:

“A couple of old dorm-floor hits later my brain springs a leak and my life seems to trickle out, as I tell Jamie and Skeet my whole story: how I left a good job as a business reporter two years ago to start an unlikely poetry-and-investment website, how we got buried in the housing collapse just as my senile father moved in, how I scrambled back to my old newspaper job, only to get laid off eight weeks ago…” (Read more here.)

It’s a refresher on the Great Recession, as well as a timeless description on the stress of job hunting, while also establishing Matt’s dilemma, and even a couple of his flaws.

My student Atash Yaghmaian faced a similar challenge when writing her memoir My Name Means Fire, part of which takes place in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.

The street protests, the fall of the Shah, and the rise of the Islamic Republic, the hostages held at the US Embassy—some readers may have watched it unfold on the news, or read about it in books like Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Yet other readers, especially non-Iranian ones, could hold common misbeliefs about the Revolution, such as that the Ayatollah Khomeini enjoyed broad support across all Iranians when he took power.

Atash handles this by describing the revolution through a very tight focus—literally her view from atop her father’s shoulders, and then later, through the lens of the woman who knows how it all turned out.

“It was an exciting time, even for little children. Thousands of people came out daily to show their dissatisfaction with the Shah and his regime. They wanted democracy.

I, like so many Iranians, still hold the word “revolution” as somewhat positive—sort of like a parent you want to respect, yet who has let you down in so many ways. When I think of that time, my heart leaps up with joy, but as I play the years forward, I see only devastation and heartbreak…” (Read more here.)

Here, Atash deploys historical facts to build atmosphere for her story, so that the reader isn’t attending a lecture on Iranian history. They’re seeing one little girl, surrounded by a nation of heartsick, frightened adults.

It’s like something one of my own writing teachers said to us often: To get your arms around something big, think small.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers