Column: On being detail-oriented in modern times

“If my judge is ready,” says a voice, prompting me to look up from a sheaf of papers and nod. The student shows me a gadget that might have come straight from my own kitchen.

“My timer shows ten minutes and one second, and it is counting down,” she says. She places the timer down on a desk, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and punches a button to begin. The plastic binder in her hand rattles as she opens it and launches into a dramatic reading. The event dictates that she can’t move her feet, so she finds other ways to evoke movement and intensity. The words may have been written by someone else but it is her job to make me believe, for the next ten minutes and one second, that they belong only to her.

I scratch out notes in unreadable cursive. The eight competitors in this section have all written their identification codes on the whiteboard so that I will know they are all present and accounted for. Every detail of this day has been plotted well in advance, from the sequence of students to the time I’m given to mark my ballots and deliver them to those organizing the next round. Some students are competing simultaneously in several events and must sprint from building to building to make it there on time. Somehow they manage, slipping in and out between speakers, dressed to the nines and looking far more calm and professional than I do, scribbling furiously and chugging hot coffee.

“You did not know where to look,” said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, “and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.” In this moment, the devil really is in the details––and success, too.

The student finishes her monologue and stops the timer to show me the eleven seconds remaining on the display. I don’t have a chance to put down my pen before the next speaker reaches the front of the classroom. “Is my judge ready?” she asks. The ninety-minute round passes quickly, but not in a blur. The way each student stands and their tones of voice, pace of delivery, quality and duration of eye contact, passion and engagement with the text––all of these details matter. Distinguishing one clear winner from such a concentrated pool of talent is hard enough, and ranking all eight is soul-crushingly difficult. It is at this moment––when I must do exactly what I have committed to do and judge these students based on their performances today––that one of my greatest flaws becomes my greatest asset.

“You’re obsessed with details,” someone told me yesterday, castigating my tendency to bury friends and readers alike beneath an avalanche of supposedly non-essential information. What he doesn’t know is that mastery of detail has led me to win nearly every argument I have ever landed in. I once emerged victorious from a debate over foreign policy because I knew the comparative areas of all seven continents and had memorized the water levels in Australia’s major reservoirs. And while as a writer I know that a good story isn’t just a string of facts––it’s how we use them that matters––I often think we get so caught up in our own lives that we forget to take notice of the world and people around us. Of course, this is coming from someone who is hyperaware of details and collects them like a reservoir collects runoff.

Sherlock Holmes, overwhelmed by his own sensitivity to detail, turns to opium to anesthetize himself. As a work of fiction, he needed no other reservoir of strength to survive than his own brilliance. Much as I love his character, I am not Sherlock Holmes. I cannot afford to ignore the little things because once, others ignored them in me.

I was thirteen when I first tried to commit suicide. I was fourteen when I first picked up sewing scissors and began cutting. Despite having a family that cared––deeply––about me, no one ever knew. No one ever noticed the missing pills and bandages, the vomiting. The way I pulled my shirtsleeves down to cover the scars. I survived mainly due to good luck and ignorance, and as an adult I found the language and science of depression. I also found it impossible to ignore the little tells when I saw them in others, or stumbled across them woven into the manuscripts I graded as an instructor of English, in Arkansas and Arizona. Details win and lose debates. Details give stories their backbone. And if we chose to take note of them, details can save lives.