Easter Stories and Little Details by Allison Symes

Image Credits: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

The Easter story is the greatest of all time but, within it, I have favourites. One is that of Mary mistaking Jesus for the gardener. You can picture it. Blinded by her grief, she literally couldn’t see who the man was. It was only when He spoke, she knew Him. We understand her here.  

Little details in our stories will help convince a reader our characters could be real. There are plenty of little details in the Biblical stories which, for me, cement their truthfulness. 

Someone would have queried the resurrection. It was and is an incredible story. It was unexpected for the disciples despite Jesus telling them about it repeatedly! They hadn’t taken it in. Mind you, I know I would’ve been the same. The story of Doubting Thomas makes the resurrection more real to me. I like to think of that as his ministry in a way.

I always wonder if Jesus visited His mother after the resurrection. The Bible doesn’t say but I would hope so. On Good Friday, I can picture easily Mary recalling Simeon telling her a sword would pierce her soul as she watched Jesus die. Naturally I want her to have the joy of the resurrection on Easter Sunday and then, maybe only then, she truly appreciated how special her Son was and is.  

I also love the exchange between Jesus and John on Good Friday where the latter takes Mary into his home. Little details again, here with powerful emotional resonance, the loving act of a dying son for his mother.

So it would pay, I think, to take time to work out what little details you want to plant in your stories and characters to help bring them to life for your readers. What do your readers need to know? How can you best show this? What emotional resonance do you want your readers to pick up? 

Dialogue and internal thoughts show attitudes, as well as what characters are saying or thinking. You can show your characters having memories as a way of sharing information. 

It would not be unreasonable in a romance story to have a character remember why they don’t like going on dates before then sending them on one! I would want to read on to find out what made them go. Most I think would too but it is that little detail of recalling why the character dislikes dates which acts as the hook here.

This is where the phrase write what you know comes into its own. As writers, we draw on our experiences of life, our love of books and characters, to help us create stories and characters of our own. 

But we have to be the first to understand our character motivations. We have motivations. They do too. Readers latch on to these. A character must have good reasons for being the way they are and for wanting the goal they do, otherwise there is no story.