The Flip Side of Specificity

On numbers in fictional prose

The mayor, spotted at the opera. Photo by alevision.co on Unsplash.

Be specific is solid advice to give to a fiction writer. I don’t feel very connected to a character who lives in “the city.” Not as much as I do when they live in Chicago or Astoria, Queens. And how marvelous when a surgeon drives a green Aston Martin DB4 to the hospital at dawn instead of “his English car.”