Specificity Trap
Avoiding Shortcuts That Don’t Save You
“It’s a trap!”
—Admiral Ackbar
I’m like Bojack’s agent Marv in that I always want article titles to be as short as possible: Two words, max. Attention spans these days are very short, so we have to keep it moving. Nobody has time to read a really long title. I don’t have words to waste on attracting people to read this, all the words are in here contributing to the mission. There are no leftover words.
Today’s article is about how to use specificity thoughtfully in your writing and what to avoid. I am using specificity not in the medical or biologic sense but to nominally refer to the act of specifying something: To make something specific. This is not a bonafide use of the word specificity; don’t bother reporting me to the language police. I am the language police.
Who watches the watchmen?
I am going to begin with two examples to illustrate unfortunate overdependence on specifics in writing: One from my personal experience in publishing and one that made the rounds of my social circles lately. At the end of the article I will close with an example of a similar thing done well and in appropriate context.
Sometime in the mid-2000s I worked for a publisher of many different things including textbooks, journals, magazines, coffee table books, monographs, and so on. We published a professional magazine for librarians and others who serve young adult readers, and that magazine reviewed books intended for those readers. To that end, many other publishers—including self-publishers—sent books to our office in hopes that they would be sent out to freelance reviewers and then recommended in the magazine.
Tucked away in a corner of our office was the one person whose job was managing all that and outside of her cube was a big box of books that had been sent to the magazine and that for whatever reason they had declined to send out for review. Those books were free for anyone to take who was interested. I would check the box periodically because sometimes there were books with interesting production choices, like the pink clothbound hardcover with pink dust jacket that had a naughty photo of the author’s girlfriend on the inside back jacket flap.
Anyway, I found a book in there one time that started out with a young woman joining her friends at a nightclub. The opening scene described this main character’s arrival. I no longer have it so I cannot quote directly but it went something like this:
I pulled my Mercedes-Benz S-class coupe up to the curb and put it in park, and then stepped out of the car, my Louboutin pumps making contact with the pavement. I reached over to the passenger seat to grab my Hermes Birkin purse and then tossed my keys to the valet. All eyes were on my statuesque figure in my Versace dress as I walked to the entrance.
That was really hard for me to write, I’m glad I don’t have to do that again for the next example. Whew. I hope you enjoyed reading that more than I enjoyed writing it. Lady, you took an awful lot of words to tell us “she’s rich.”
This author had words to spare. Perhaps she would write my headlines.
Example two: Some of my fellow writers were commiserating with an author lamenting a very unfair Amazon review their book received. Although the book came out several years ago, it was set specifically in the United States in the year 2020; in fact the setting and the specific year were referenced several times throughout. The reviewer thought it was a gross oversight that the author had neglected to mention the COVID-19 pandemic at all, even in passing.
Both authors made the same mistake: They added unnecessary details to take a shortcut. Those details came back to bite the hands that wrote them.
It’s not that there were details at all or too many details. Obviously, writing needs details. Nobody said don’t put details. I talked a little bit about precision language and using shortcuts for it in a recent article and I’m going to be talking about it more now. I also wrote about using details sparingly and strategically in an older article. Consider these your trifecta on details.
What the authors in the above examples wanted to tell us were:
This character is wealthy.
This book is set in a very-near-future America.
What the examples actually told me were:
This author wasn’t sure how to describe the interior life of a wealthy person so instead she tried to convey the experience of wealth using brand names as a cultural touchpoint.
This author didn’t know how to describe her setting to make it feel ever-so-slightly futuristic so she picked a year in the near future and went with that.
These are probably not thoughts most authors want to inspire in their readership.
I’ll begin with example number two from above. What’s wrong with saying what year your book is set in? I mean, Nineteen Eighty-Four is exactly this, and it’s one of the all-time classics written in English, right?
First of all, note that Nineteen Eighty-Four—not 1984 (although it is styled that way sometimes)—is the proper title of this novel and it begins with the famous opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” There are some numerals in the book later but I wanted to call this out: Why? Because nothing gets a reader questioning everything about what they’re reading like seeing a numeral does.
In 2007, Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh and colleagues found that the brain reacts differently to seeing a number expressed as a numeral versus seeing a number expressed as a word: For example, “1984” versus “nineteen eighty-four”; “the 60s” versus “the sixties”; or “seventeen years old” versus “17 years old.”
That’s the science part. Essentially, if you watch an MRI of someone’s brain while you show them a series of numbers expressed in different ways (Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, numbers expressed as words, or dots), you see that the reaction time is not the same all over the brain.
The part that I have seen in my own experience as a writer, editor, and reader is this: Using a numeral is the fastest way to get a reader’s calculating faculties firing on all cylinders. Numerals just make the logical part of our brains engage.
A reader is reading along, their imagination happily carried away by your words when suddenly—a numeral appears. Now they are questioning everything. If it’s 2020, where’s the pandemic? The book mentions Tuesday, March 29th, but it takes place in 1996, and March 29th was a Friday that year! The character is wearing a polyester suit in 1948 but that fabric wasn’t introduced to the public until the 1950s! What have you done?!
If you’re setting the stage and you want to evoke the feel of a specific place and a specific time, there are a lot of ways to do that without telling the reader what year it is. If you’re writing around a specific historical event? Then, yes, it’s relevant—for instance if your book takes place in New York City during the week of September 9, 2001, then you can safely mention that. If you’re trying to convey to the reader that your book takes place at a high school in Houston in the 1980s, you can do that much better with using the words “Houston” or “Texas” or “eighties” than you can with them. For an example, see Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. At no time did I have to stop reading the book to say, “Wait, they had exchange students visiting from Europe but nobody once mentioned Chernobyl are you sure this is taking place in 1986?”
Let me put it this way: What is important for the reader to know about the time period in which your story is taking place, whether it is in the past, present, or future? Is it the number on the calendar? Or is it the social and political climate, the music scene, the fashion, the cultural attitude toward youthful independence, the parenting styles, the methods of formal education in use, the types and availability of transit, and so on?
Most of the time, unless you’re writing about a specific historical event, the latter is really what you want to communicate to the reader—giving them a location and a year is a mental shortcut that relies on the reader having the same understanding of that time and place as you. That’s never a guarantee.
Consider the young woman headed out for a night of clubbing in example one. Having read the brief description on the back of the book, I understood that this person was the book’s protagonist and hero, and was not intended to be a satire nor was she intended to come off as an unpleasant or unlikable person. The reader is supposed to understand that she is wealthy and fashionable and enjoys nice things.
The writer is relying here on some assumptions that don’t hold up. First, she has assumed that all her readers will understand who all the manufacturers and designers are that she has name-dropped. That’s probably true of readers in the United States and some parts of Europe and who care about women’s fashion and accessories. If you’re targeting the same audience as The Devil Wears Prada (Weisberger) or Bringing Home the Birkin (Tonello)—books about the women’s fashion and accessories industry—then you’re probably fine. But this was a romantic thriller that had nothing to do with the industry. You don’t want your reader stopping to Google what a Birkin is or how much it costs. As a rule, you never want to cause your reader to stop reading and engage with something else.
Next, she’s assuming that readers will draw the same conclusion from these dropped names as she intended the reader to take—she assumes that there is only one interpretation of a character who arrives to a nightclub in an expensive car decked out in expensive clothing. But that’s not true—there are always multiple interpretations, of anything (hers, hers, and the truth, right?). One reader may see this character as someone who is frivolous with her money, unserious and concerned with trivialities instead of a character who enjoys fine things and makes sensible choices in light of that.
When a reader meets a new character, that’s like meeting a new person in real life. If you met a brand-new person and they sidled up to you and said, “Hey, did you know my shoes are expensive? And my purse? And my car? And my dress?” What would you think about that person? Would you draw the conclusion that this is a fashionable person who enjoys nice things? That’s not my immediate reaction. Name-dropping isn’t a good look on anybody.
How do you avoid falling into this trap? Again, isolate what it really is that you want the reader to know: Is it important what label is on the shoes? Or is it important to know that this young woman is stylish and confident? If the latter, then consider whether this is the best way to show style and confidence. Does a truly confident person peg their self-worth to the cost of their belongings? Is a stylish person someone who makes choices based on price tag?
Further, how will this story age? This would have been written sometime around 2005 to 2007, right around when Louboutin first hit the top of the Luxury Brand Status Index and right in the window when The Devil Wears Prada came out in theaters. A recession and a global pandemic later, luxury goods don’t have quite the same vibe as they did before that housing bubble burst.
I promised a counterexample for examination, too, and I have one. Two, in fact, but they go together. Often, when an author relies on brand names or lists of very specific things, they’re taking a shortcut to tell us about a character because we, the readers, are expected to do the mental work of extrapolating the sociocultural meaning and value of whatever things were listed.
But take Lisbeth Salander, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She’s a world-class computer hacker and she doesn’t relate well to other people; she sometimes wants to, but has trouble connecting with others, especially emotionally. Other characters wonder if she might be on the Autism spectrum (specifically, whether she has Asperger’s Syndrome which is now no longer recognized as a separate diagnosis).
So when Lisbeth, in the first book, purchases a new computer for herself, it is reasonable that she mentally runs through a long list of the component parts. The list makes sense if you know what all those parts are (although they fix the story in time ) but it also makes sense if you don’t know what any of those parts are—of course Lisbeth would know better than you, she’s a world-class hacker and you’re just a reader. Either way, you understand from context that she has dropped a lot of money on this computer.
You also know that she’s just won back the right to her own money from a legal guardian who has been holding it hostage from her, so this spending spree has context. She is celebrating a hard-won victory. Finally, consider: Rattling off a list of esoteric computer purchases with no regard for whether the person listening understands or cares is exactly something Lisbeth Salander would do, because she is socially awkward and is never really sure what to talk with other people about. If she were forced to talk to a stranger her computer is probably the first topic she’d go to.
In short, if you’re going to have a litany of specific item names coming out of your narrator, then the information you can be sure you are conveying is, “this narrator enjoys rattling off lists of things.” If you intend to convey some meaning beyond that, the only way to make sure your list is interpretation-proof is to do what Stieg Larsson has done with Lisbeth: Craft the litany of specifics carefully enough that any interpretation of it leads back to the same conclusion.
In this case, that Lisbeth Salander is a neurodiverse individual with an unusual communication style and a deep interest in technology that surpasses the average person’s knowledge and understanding. You can get that conclusion whether you are an average person with average or less-than-average knowledge of computers or whether you are a computer wiz who knows what all these specs mean.
Even when used well, specifics will lock your narrative into places and times. Mentioning a brand that everyone knows today as a shortcut to indicate that someone is very trendy will fall flat when your book is read three years from now when the brand may longer be popular or may even be defunct.
While I was living in Los Angeles, I made a reference to Yuengling beer. This was in the middle of the Obama years, after his Yuengling faux pas while campaigning in Pennsylvania (it’s brewed there) and after he began to favor it publicly as penance. Yuengling is the United States’s oldest operating brewing company and the label, with its proud bald eagle, is a national treasure. I said, “Oh, man, I’d love to be able to get a Yuengling but I’ve never seen it out here.” The guy I was out with looked at me blankly and said, “Why not? We can get Chinese beers here. We have Tsingtao.”
Never assume people know stuff; people don’t know stuff.
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