Specificity

In professional and volunteering roles, I spend a lot of time reviewing technical proposals and presentations, which involves rating them on some kind of scale, and then providing justifications for those ratings.  As you might expect from my other writing, my justifications can be somewhat…extensive.  A little like when I write thirty thousand words of feedback for a hundred-thousand-word novel, except I’m blunter in my technical feedback.  Perhaps the most common critique I give is lack of specificity.

It shows up everywhere, it ties to a general lack of emphasis on the importance of quantitative analysis and attention to detail, and I’ve become more attuned to it in the process of doing these technical reviews.  I could probably write an entire post on the value of specificity in a variety of applications, but since this is, ostensibly, a writing site, I do try to connect these posts to writing topics, and in this case, I want to address the value of specificity in writing stories.

Storytelling probably isn’t the first discipline that comes to mind when you think about specificity.  Being specific with what you say might seem important in legal writing, essays, philosophy, and other, less fictional formats, but storytelling is less obvious.  If you’ve been paying attention to our posts about word choice, though, you can probably see its relevance.  Choosing between ostensible synonyms is not simply a matter of personal preference or aligning the rhythmic qualities of the language (although those can be factors) – it is a matter of being specific about what you intend to communicate.  There is an immense difference between walking and striding, despite them being essentially synonymous.  Connotation matters.

Specificity also augments immersivity.  This can be seen in worldbuilding quite easily; for instance, having characters wield specific kinds of weapons, instead of generically handing them all swords, is the kind of detail that helps build the realism of the world and draw the reader into the story.  It can be in the language itself, too, and the way things are described.  Varying the specificity of descriptions when writing in a first person or a third person limited viewpoint can both contribute to character development – characters will tend to be more specific about their field of expertise – and to conveying the type of story which is being told.  Even in third person omniscient, being more or less specific in certain descriptions can serve, for example, as a kind of genre flag.  It would seem out of place in a fantasy novel to describe an elapsed time in minutes and seconds, and it would seem similarly strange in a science fiction novel to describe an elapsed distance in paces.

Writing advice often refers to the iceberg theory, the idea that you can use allusion and the inclusion of small details to give the suggestion to the reader of a much larger world or idea, without having to develop it fully.  This is all about specificity.  Being specific about one thing leads the reader to infer a similar level of detail about everything else, and to better spin off their imagination from the starting point the author provides.  Perhaps more importantly, being specific in key places can increase reader trust in the author.  It is a demonstration of the thought the author has put into the story, and readers notice it.  If you capture the specific details of some skill, the reader will be reassured that you know what you are talking about, not just for that particular event, but for other events that come up throughout the story.

Sometimes, when I complain about lack of specificity, people misunderstand.  They think I’m telling them they need to include more numbers, with more significant figures.  Sometimes that’s true, especially in those technical reviews I mentioned earlier, but not always.  More often, I’m seeking more qualitative specificity.  Don’t just tell me a spacecraft should be in LEO – give me an idea of the altitude, if it’s a circular or elliptical orbit, what the inclination will be.  Don’t just tell me Raven cooked the potatoes – show me him boiling the freshly scrubbed, golden potatoes in well-salted water on the cherry-red burner of the cast iron stovetop.  It’s not the temperature of the water of the number of potatoes that makes that scene specific.  We’ve established already that words matter; it’s just as important to be specific with them.