Specificity is the spice of life
How specific details can bring your writing to life
Details help us anchor our stories and ground our readers in the moments we’re describing. Anne Lamott says that “good writing is about telling the truth.” It is specific details that help us tell our own, unique truths in a visceral way that our readers can feel, imagine, and imprint upon.
For example, I can say “I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for eight years. I love this town and it means so much to me.” Or I can say something like this:
“I wear my Ann Arbor Art Fair volunteer shirt like a badge of honor every July. I had my first latte seven years ago in an old house tucked into the edge of Braun Court. I fell in love in the dusty, crowded poetry section of Dawn Treader and I had my heart broken on the corner of Washington and South Fifth.”
Which one tells a better story? It’s hard to see my life in Ann Arbor after that first pass, but the latter paints a much clearer picture. It also (hopefully) helps you relate to my story — maybe you’ve had a volunteer job you loved, or remember your first latte, or had your heart broken in a public place. Your details give your readers a way to relate to you.
Details, and particularly their specificity, are what makes our work unique. I had a writing instructor who always pushed back on the word beautiful.
“This word again— what does beauty mean to you here?”
She was right to question me. Beauty is such a big, vague, important concept. That being said, it changes all the time. What’s beautiful to me might not be beautiful to the person I sit next to at work, and vice versa.
I can say that a sunset is beautiful, sure. You’d probably even believe me. But it’s better for me to press into this idea of beauty and write about how sunsets make me feel. If I do a really good job, maybe my readers will learn something about me.
We have great sunsets all the time here in Ann Arbor. When I first moved here, I bemoaned the fact that sunsets in a landlocked city would never measure up to watching the sun disappear beneath Lake Michigan. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong, and seven o’clock often bathes my house in pale pink and purple light that makes my attic apartment feel like the inside of the fairytale books my parents read to me as a child.
Despite their frequency, these sunsets always compel me to pry the screen out of my window with a pocket knife and climb out onto the roof to stare for twenty minutes. In fact, it was one of these nights when I was perched three stories up, watching gold fade through to magenta and periwinkle and violet, that inspired the air symbol that’s inked into my ribs. Sunsets are beautiful to me because of the promise they make — that endings can be just as splendid as beginnings.
There’s a lot more detail in those sentences, even though they’re all based on one word. Unfortunately, the truth is that sometimes we use words like “beauty” as a crutch to avoid writing about the details. So the next time that you think something is beautiful, push on that word a little. Why is it beautiful? What makes it beautiful to you? Is there something throwing that beauty into contrast?
I think you’ll like what you come up with. It’s gratifying to write about something as universal as beauty in a way that feels personal and truthful and specific. You get to use your own writing to breathe new life into that one word.
I took a songwriting class once, and the instructor had us begin with two steps:
- Distill your song into its core element — what it’s about
- Without making it a narrative, write down the details
This is a nice place to start with regular writing too. Lamott urges that the key to creating a strong plotline is to “let there be something at stake.” I saw this question written in the infamous red pen along the margins of my college papers many times — What’s at stake?
Let this be your core element. Your story is ultimately about this one thing — the thing that got you writing the story in the first place, the thing that matters, the thing that’s at stake. Distill your ideas into what your story is about, and then expand your scope to take in all the details that help sharpen and focus in on the very thing that’s at stake. Often times, the writing itself will uncover this for you.
Writing the details is also the fun part, my friends. I took a creative writing class in college and my instructor told me that as nice as they were, long lists of descriptions did not creative writing make. But I wrote them anyway because those details were the things that made my work (and me) feel raw and alive and honest.
I wrote a piece about my family’s house that was an entire page of lines like “bending shelves and cold windowsills were lined by jars full of sand, candles, stones, water, weathered beach glass.” I wrote an unorthodox love letter to things that make me happy, like “farmers’ market booths lined with bundles of lavender that smell like my childhood.”
I even wrote a poem once, to a boy after he left Ann Arbor (and me, as it turned out) for a summer internship. I wrote about the things we’d both forget about each other — the details.
“It will be the shape of your ears, the length of your eyelashes, how you smell/Like cigarettes and coffee and nights when we made shadow puppets on the wall/How your lips pull into smiles, the low rumble in your voice when you read to me/The way your hands pick at guitars, wrap around mugs, splay against my skin.
You’ll forget the way your name sounds in my mouth/That I take my coffee with cream and no sugar, my tea with sugar and no cream/The faded lilac of my sheets and the feeling of my arms wrapped around your neck/How quietly, the only time, I whispered I love you into the dark.”
Reading those details now makes me feel like I’m 19 again and standing in the doorway of a house on Packard, watching as a beat-up white truck drives east out of town. That’s the power of specificity.
If these kinds of details don’t come naturally to you, don’t worry. Try this — close your eyes and imagine that you’re back in your childhood home. Draw on your five senses.
What can you see — maybe white paint chipping along the edges of a piano or your family dog curled up in front of the refrigerator?
What does it smell like — the betrayal of fresh popcorn after you’d been put to bed or sagebrush candles?
What do you taste — the white chicken chili you hated or orange juice too soon after brushing your teeth with that weird organic toothpaste?
What do you hear — the thundering of little bare feet on wooden stairs or your dad’s laugh piercing through the Seinfeld theme?
What do you feel — the deep grooves in the couch or your mother’s hand against your back?
If anything came to mind just now, write it down! Use that as the beginning of a piece about your childhood.
These details are the things that will open up your writing to others. They invite people into your world and give them something to share in. The more your readers invest in your story’s specificity, the more impact your work will have because the thing that’s at stake for you will start to be at stake for them too.
You’ll also realize, as your writing begins to center around these specific details, that you’ll start seeing the world as a writer does — in details. Lamott says that “writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”
I’m suggesting that you start by working in reverse — write pieces that are all about those details, so people think you were paying attention at that moment in time. After a while, all of these special things and moments will begin to stick out to you as if your life is shouting at you — write about this, communicate this!
These details also open you up to your own life. They teach you to pay attention to the things happening around you and you’ll begin to interact with the world as if it’s communicating to you what is going on. The only thing you have to do then is to take notice and write it down.
