On Saturday, I participated in the Kentucky Book Festival. The venue was the Joseph-Beth bookstore, a two-level store in Lexington. We authors sat at our tables with our books displayed, and we chatted with folks who stopped to look at our books. The author who was sharing my table never appeared, so from time to time, my wife Cathy, stopped by to see how things were going. Cathy is an excellent wing-person for someone who’s less outgoing like me. Cathy never met a stranger. She can talk to anyone. “You’re going to want some of these,” she’d say to people who lingered at my table, and then she’d start talking about my books. “This is my favorite,” she’d say. “It’s a tale of hexes and spells and women who steal other women’s lovers.” She’d come up with that elevator pitch for my novel, Break the Skin. I was at the festival to promote my latest novel, The Evening Shades. Cathy was practiced at talking about that book, too, and tying it to its prequel, The Bright Forever. I stepped in and talked about the true crimes upon which those books are based. Together, Cathy and I hawked my wares.

Traffic was brisk throughout the day. I saw some old friends and made some new ones. One encounter stands out. Two young women, maybe eighteen or nineteen, were passing by in single file. The woman in front was wearing a sweatshirt whose front read, MSPR. I called her over to my table so I could ask her what the letters stood for.

“I don’t know,” she said. “This shirt belonged to my grandmother. She gave it to me, and I wear it.” The woman paused a moment in thought. “I think it has something to do with Morehead State.” The woman’s friend shrugged her shoulders as if to say, I don’t have a clue. This is an important detail. Remember the friend had been following the sweatshirt-wearing woman as the approached my table. When the women left, the friend was still walking behind the woman. I saw on the backside of the sweatshirt: Morehead State Public Radio.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of our eyes, but we’re not looking. Writers can’t be blind to the details of their or their characters’ worlds, and yet, especially in fiction, characters usually have details and truths they’d rather not acknowledge. It’s the job of the writer to put enough pressure on those characters so they come to a level of knowing that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

What are your characters not seeing? If you write creative nonfiction, particularly memoir, what are you not seeing? Maybe it’s something about another person or a situation. Maybe it’s something about yourself. What question or questions might lead to a moment of revelation, a moment where you or someone else knows more than you or they might think possible.

Choose a public setting like a book festival. Highlight a character or two who encounters your main character. Make the encounter vivid with details. What are people saying to one another? What does your main character—you if you’re writing memoir—believe. Choose a single detail such as the sweatshirt in my story. How can you use it in a scene to take your main character where they didn’t know they needed to go? What changes?

The power of fiction or memoir can reside in the details. As writers, all we have to do is keep our eyes and ears open. We have to pay attention to the details so we can see where they want to lead us.