One of the most fundamental skills of the fiction writer is the ability to descend to the concrete, to kick forth the sort of details that make the fictional world come to life. It's not just the simple mechanical piling up of detail, either, that's wanted. The details one selects must reveal character, establish mood, tone and atmosphere, must shade in the texture and grit of one's made-up world. In short, the details must be significant. On his blog, actor Wil Wheaton geeks out over the loving care a makeup artist devotes to making him appear appropriately scruffy for his role on CSI: "It would be easy to just make my hands dirty, but there's a beautiful logic to the makeup. This scrape on my wrist leads into that scab on my forearm; this bruise has a trace mark in the middle of it. A streak of dirt ends on my finger, so there's black makeup applied beneath that nail, and it's thicker than the gunk beneath the next fingernail.
	These Canada geese have descended to the concrete just north of Lake Laverne.
			Will the audience notice? Probably not. If the audience is marveling at how realistic my dirty hands look, we're in trouble dramatically. But all these details add up unconsciously to make the show real. I know as an actor that it helps me inhabit the character I'm portraying at a cellular level." Wheaton as actor seems to appreciate the ritualistic nature of wearing makeup and the care the make-up artist devotes to this craft. The makeup itself actually helps the actor inhabit his role. Let's make the analogy to fiction writing. Concrete details, the specific details, the things that appeal to the reader's senses--these are the author's "makeup," so to speak. As authors, we use these things in service of believability, to make our fiction come to life, yes. But there's yet another reason we use them--to help us begin to inhabit the world of our fiction, to capture its reality at a cellular level, to imagine it into existence. This is the ritualistic nature of the specific details. We descend to the concrete (observe the ritual, in other words) in order to activate our imaginative world.
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