Mindfulness is the buzz word, isn’t it? Or is it just because I live in California?

I attended a yoga class last week. The lesson for the day, including climbing like spiders up the wall, was about mindful eating. Each of us was offered a raisin—yes, singular—and instructed to hold it close to our eyes and observe its wrinkles and crusty sparkles.

Then we smelled it. Essence of sugary, ripe jam.

Then we were asked to listen to it. “Horton Hears A Who,” anyone?

Yes, we listened to those tiny raisin voices as we held them close to our ears and rolled them between our thumbs and forefingers. Mine squeaked.

“Please, I know you’re going to eat me. Can we just get this over with?”

Yoga is a cruel sport, isn’t it?

Finally, we were asked to put those raisins on our tongues and roll them around in our mouths for a full minute before being allowed to chew.

In much less than one minute, I knew I didn’t have the mindful moral fiber it takes to be a true yogi. I wanted to chew that soggy, yet crystalline, drop of zero taste and swallow. Then I wanted to grab a whole handful of those little squeakers, stuff my mouth, and grind away, turning them into a sweet mass of gumminess. That, my friends, is how you get the real flavor of raisins.

The solitary fleck of grit in the universe of my mouth was—

“Chew!” said the instructor. “Chew! Chew! Chew!”

My train had already left the station.

I must remember to do this

Let’s move the focus from my flawed moral character to how “one vs. many” plays out with language. Despite the lovely alliteration, repetition and raisins should not be bedfellows.

A whole handful of examples (adverbs being one) will often not make the experience that much sweeter, richer, or more textured for the reader. It usually achieves the opposite. Instead of strengthening the effect, the writer steeps weak tea. Instead of making the prose rich, the writer sews the empty pockets of a pauper. Instead of making the prose more muscular, the writer births a 98 pound weakling.

Shoot me now before I have to read another cliché in a string of clichés.

The moral of the story is this. Whenever you’re tempted to:

• create characters whose purpose is redundant (or worse, nonexistent), eliminate or combine two or more characters to achieve the same effect.
• indulge in repetitive sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters that don’t move the story forward, cut and/or combine.
• use weak verbs “strengthened” by adverbs, select strong verbs and cut the adverbs.
• create weak dialogue and surrounding exposition that relies on adverbs (commonly called “two-by-fours”) or repetition to get the point across, take the opposite approach. Dialogue means you’re in scene. Show one single telling detail (not two or three or four) that conveys the essence of the character or character’s reaction, thoughts, or physical trait. Extra points for doing this via dialogue instead of in the exposition used to anchor characters in space.
• give characters multiple actions that convey the same meaning, select one action that’s unusual to convey the essence of your point.

If there is a critical moment or action that begs repeating for fear your reader won’t “get it,” think and think again and then think some more about whether it’s necessary, or whether it’s a matter of finding a better way to say it once to make it unforgettable for the reader.

And to remind myself of these points when I’m revising, I’m going to breathe and think of:

Someone I know lost a very close friend this past weekend. He was only 43 years old and left behind a wife (the love of his life) and two kids, one a 4-yr-old diagnosed a few weeks ago with a rare form of cancer. The child had come home last week from his first round of chemo and a follow-up stay at the hospital, and over the weekend, the father had a massive heart attack in his sleep. In the real world, this is tragic. Extraordinarily tragic.

In the world of fiction, would a reader believe this story?

Ever had someone read your work and say “I don’t believe it happened that way”? I have. And that means I didn’t do a solid job of constructing the fictional dream that draws the “buy in” from readers. I put on the hard hat and built the house with some old rotten planks I found lying around, ones that had seen better days, but it’s a house, right? For some people, the structure may hold, but many will find the whole thing too shaky to be willing to walk through the door.

I wouldn’t go in there

And it doesn’t matter that it really happened if you can’t make the reader believe it, right?

I just came back from a writing conference where John Gardner, the author of “The Art of Fiction,” got slammed once again. But it’s funny how everyone objects to the “voice” in that book—he’s soooo snotty!!—but few ever refute his points. On page 22, where he explains how to get buy-in, he categorizes three types of writing:

1) The realistic writer makes events convincing through verisimilitude, real world, real details, real responses. This is Alice Munro’s bailiwick.

2) The tale teller writing of ghosts, shape-shifters, or characters who may never sleep depends on confidence and authority, the “quality of voice” to charm the reader or distract the “critical intelligence,” what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” I’m thinking right now of a recent read called The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper. The narrator’s voice begins powerfully and stays strong throughout the story, and he’s also a master of the “telling detail.”

3) The yarn writer, the one whose lies are so outrageous and entertaining that the reader is pulled along by the brilliance of the falsehood. This one is easy. Think Mark Twain.

Gardner goes on to explain that all three types of writing depend on precise detail. Hmmmm, what details? Well, if your character walks into a bar, your reader knows what a bar looks like:

NOOOOO!!!!!! Not that kind of bar! This kind…

Get the point? Fill in the pieces that MUST be known and let the reader fill in the rest of the fictional dream.

If the reader is moved to ask the dreaded question: “Would ____ really have said/done that?” we know the reader has fallen out of the dream and on to the floor.

Ouch!

And readers don’t like such a rude awakening.

Pay attention to what is real, the emotional core of the moment. Write from that center of authority and—yes, I’ll use that overused word—authenticity. So that is craft, right?

Now comes the “other” part of writing.

One of Gardner’s points that often gets glossed over in this “detail” business is that fiction is not meant solely to entertain or distract us from our personal concerns, but “helps us know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.”

To do so, we must move beyond craft. Gardner says:

“No amount of intellectual study can determine for the writer what details he (she) should include.” Everything must be chosen “by feeling and intuition. And one of the things he (she) will discover, inevitably, is that the images of death and loss that come to him (her) are not necessarily those we might expect.”

He goes on to suggest that in order to tell the truth, one must empty one’s mind of those images that instantly come to the forefront. Or as Karen Joy Fowler suggests: “I find that if I go with my first ‘gut response,’ it is the easiest, most facile, most seen before image. I have to work harder to figure out what should really happen.”

Keep throwing the darts until you hit the bulls-eye

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes how her husband died, chatting with her and drinking a cocktail while she prepared dinner.

“I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.

I remember saying Don’t do that. 

When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked…In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York-Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.

Someone else.”

The details she selects to describe the event and her specific response—she had difficulty eating for months afterward because the trauma occurred at mealtime—leave the reader with no room for disbelief.

But one more thing: She sets the scene with thoughts that everyone has:

“Confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames…”

Again, we are right there with her. We know this happens.

But how do you find that magical intuition that knows what details are necessary for the story? Spin a sticky web, and go to sleep. See what you’ve caught in the morning?

If that doesn’t work, try practice. Just like meditation, you’ve got to show up and do the work of emptying your mind before you fill it up. Think “Zen mind, beginner’s mind.”

So when a young father with a child who’s just been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer shows up in your fictional world, find the details that only you can provide, the ones that “make it real” for you.