Wes Anderson and the Immersiveness of Precise Detail
Wes Anderson pays attention, I learn how to go clubbing, Lori Ostlund writes a great book, and new literary events and classes!
A few weeks ago at Cinémathèque in Paris, I visited “Wes Anderson, the Exhibition,” a retrospective of the filmmaker’s career that showcased notebooks, props, and costumes, puppets, and set design elements from his first twelve movies. I’ve been a Wes Anderson fan since 1996’s “Bottle Rocket,” but the exhibit made me appreciate his artistry even more. I am a sucker for displays of artists’ tools—that’s why I love looking at the messy paint palettes and brushes at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and the still-life-starring vases and bowls in Cézanne’s atelier. I eagerly examined the notebooks Anderson used to plan his movies.
The notebooks are nothing fancy—National Brand spiral-bound brown board cover single subjects—but the ideas Wes Anderson filled them with became his incredible films. It’s inspiring to look at the origins of a work of art that seems beyond anything most people can achieve—such as Anderson’s full-fledged award-winning movies—and find that it begins with a tool that any creative person can use.
When I begin a new piece, my notebooks often look like Anderson’s, covered with a tumble of thoughts. Sometimes I look at what I’ve scribbled and think, “How did I think this was worth saving?” and other times I think, “This could turn into something if I keep working.” Many of us lose confidence at this stage, or can’t figure out how to fully realize our ideas. It’s tricky work to translate that initial vision into anything that resembles the dream that flickered in your head.
I’ve been thinking about why ideas fizzle, and I suppose there are a lot of reasons. Sometimes the initial idea is misguided. Sometimes we don’t have the time, financial resources, or creative support to bring an idea to life. And sometimes we give it a try, and in the end we decide it just kind of sucks, or the rejections we receive for it tell us as much. But the evolution of Wes Anderson’s ideas suggests key elements that can help artists work past the fizzle and the suck: specificity, precision, and total commitment.
The exhibit showed how precise Anderson was in carrying out his ideas. I appreciated how he crafted all the props so they looked absolutely authentic, designing the covers of prop books so they were characteristic of the genre and the era in which they were published. He attended to perfume bottles, hotel room keys, clothes, paintings, and household objects. Some of these details are tiny in the films, and a moviegoer probably wouldn’t notice if he hadn’t produced an actual book, but I think his artistry is built on this attention to minutia, even though he might be better known for the grand, sweeping vision that results from the accumulation of this precise detail.
Precision and specificity of detail might be the single most important quality that separates art that is published, produced, or supported from unrealized efforts. When I read 91 short story collections as a screener judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award last year and had to winnow them down, all ten I selected gripped me with vivid detail that immersed me immediately in the world of the story. Writers who caught my attention almost always opted for the specific over the general. These details convinced me of the writer’s authority. Each character they introduced arrived on the page accompanied with two or three telling, original details that fixed them in the reader’s mind.
Sometimes writers I’m helping will introduce characters as blank names, with no identifying details, or the details they include won’t be vivid or idiosyncratic enough. But, I’ve never read a published book, essay, or story that introduces characters this way, with a blank names. (If you’ve read one, please enlighten me in the comments!) I think it’s too hard for a reader to latch onto the world you’re creating if you don’t give the reader a few distinctive details, and convince them that you’ve fully imagined this place you’re writing about, even if you only show part of what you know.
With Wes Anderson, there’s never any doubt that he’s completely envisioned the places and people he depicts, and that he’s inviting us into his gorgeously detailed imagination. It all starts with those doodles and notes in his notebooks, which he works through with costume and set designers, actors, and other professionals until his truly original films emerge.
Building this kind of detail starts with observation. When I work with a student whose prose hasn’t come to life yet because it lacks vivid, specific detail, I send them back to their writer’s notebook and instruct them to observe the world, to learn the precise words for objects and living things. To jot down unusual phrases they hear. To pay attention the distinctive features of the world.
We don’t all have the fame and support staff that Wes Anderson has now, but I appreciated learning how he started with the simple resources he could muster—he convinced a producer to front $4000 for him and Owen Wilson to start shooting the first eight minutes of “Bottle Rocket,” and then used those eight minutes to attract the funding they needed to finish it. As Anderson gained more acclaim and support, he gradually was able to realize more of his vision, and achieve the characteristic style his later films are known for. So, start where you are, with an inexpensive notebook, and take good notes!
Assorted Whimsy
While in Paris, my daughter and I also went to a museum exhibit called Clubbing at the Grand Palais Immersif. The exhibition aimed to teach visitors about the history of club going, from the disco era to ‘90s raves to the present day, while also making you feel like you were in a giant club, complete with dance floors, strobe lights, fog machines, and historic playlists from club touchstones like Studio 54 in New York and Les Bains Douches in Paris. We were just about the only people there when we visited one afternoon, despite the lovely and rare air conditioning it provided on a sweltering day.
“You know how this works,” I told my daughter. “The more fun we are, the more fun this is.” We each threw back a shot of gift shop espresso and ventured into the immersive experience. Reader, I danced. I pretended to DJ. I created a club kid avatar, and learned about the varied personas of club goers. In a photo booth, I even became some of them.
When I tried to text myself the images, I accidentally texted them to my husband, who responded by texting my daughter: “I think Jenny’s phone has been hacked.” In a sense, he was right. If you want to create an authentic club dance party at home, here are Spotify playlists from Paradise Garage, New York, 1977, Les Bains Douches, Paris, 1978, and Ministry of Sound, London, 1991.
The Tumbleweed Book Recommendation
One of the best short story writers in America happens to be my friend Lori Ostlund, and I want to recommend her terrific new collection Are You Happy? Lori is the series editor of the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, an award she won with her first collection, The Bigness of the World. The fantastic novella from her new collection, “Just Another Family” was selected by Lauren Groff for the Best American Short Stories and by Edward P. Jones for the O. Henry Prize Stories, a rare feat—kind of the equivalent of the EGOT for a short story.
Many of these wise, funny, melancholy stories involve a character who grows up in a small Minnesota town and leaves it for a community where they feel more at home, while still trying to occasionally connect with the friends and family they’ve grown distant from. In “Clear as Cake,” a college student taking a creative writing workshop speaks to her parents on the phone once a week, her dad urging her to “Remember, Renee, communism is Satan at work,” while her mom “conversed in details.” Even though Renee’s teacher tells her to use vivid details in her writing, when it comes to the daily minutia her mother discloses, she thinks, “I was not interested in these details, all of them adding up to a life I did not want.” In “The Peeping Toms,” Miriam and Clarice are life and business parters, running a furniture store and tending their pets in Albuquerque when they notice a man peering in their window and taking laundry from their clothesline. And in the masterful “Just Another Family,” a woman returns home to Minnesota after her father’s death to contend with her disapproving mother, her cranky sister, and memories of oddity and violence she can’t square with the person she’s become. It left me emotionally beached! Like the club playlists I shared above, Are You Happy? contains nothing but bangers, friends.
Happenings & Links
I urge you to head to the East Window Gallery on Thursday, July 17 for a reading celebrating the publication of Saint Dympha’s Playbook by my brilliant former student Hillary Leftwich, who is one of the stars of the Colorado literary community and a creative force—this is her third book in four years! If you love sharp, incisive, distilled prose, don’t miss Hillary’s reading! (Also check out her Substack.) Joining Hillary is Toni Oswald, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, and Jade Lascelles. It starts at 7 p.m., and there’s a suggested donation of $5.
The poetry community and the world lost a towering, brave, beautiful spirit yesterday. Celebrate the life and work of Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson with the Lavender Poetry Slam on July 21 at Petals & Pages in Denver (6 p.m.).
Check out Lighthouse Writer’s workshop’s Short Forms Fest, filled with craft seminars, readings, and panel discussions about short stories, essays, and prose poems. You can buy a weekend pass to attend the whole festival, just afternoons, one day, or register à la carte. I’m participating in these three events:
Hauntings: Reading and Conversation with Samantha Hunt and Jenny Shank, Saturday, July 26, Happy Hour, 3:30 p.m., discussion 4:30-6:30 p.m., $25 (members), $35 (nonmembers) or included with a pass.
Panel: Does it Need to Be A Book? w/ Natalie Hodges, Jenny Shank, Denne Michele Norris (Electric Literature), Aea Varfis-van Warmelo (Granta), moderated by Andrea Dupree, Sunday, July 27, 12-1 p.m., $25 (members), $35 (nonmembers) or included with a pass.
And Then I Woke Up: Writing Endings for Short Stories and Essays, Sunday, July 27, 1:30-3:30 p.m., $75 (members), $85 (nonmembers), or included with a pass.
And in the fall I’m teaching a 4-week hybrid class (Zoom and in-person) called Memoir Structure ABCs. It runs September 15 through October 6, on Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m. (MDT).
Check out this new writing conference in Boulder called Thunderdome on August 7-10, with reading, writing, and mingling events, some of which are free!
As always, The Tumbleweed welcomes your questions and comments about writing, reading, taco eating, the Denver Nuggets, rabbit wrangling, Deion Sanders, Ralphie the Bison, and baby seals.