Taylor Swift, Troye Sivan, and the Importance of Specificity in Writing

Photo by Farnoosh Abdollahi on Unsplash

Quick Download: Adding the right kind of specificity in your prose can activate your reader’s imagination and give them a bigger role in your story.

Introduction

I am a huge fan of George Saunder’s Story Club newsletter on Substack. (If you’re into writing and do not subscribe, please just do that and stop reading this post. It’s far more important.)

In a recent article, he was actually talking about how to critique a story — the “micro-truths” and “micro-falsities” — that make us lose interest. For his example of a micro-falsity, he used the below description:

…If I write, “Tom was one of those very tall guys who, as we all know, always wears blue shoes,” your reaction is, or should be: “Wait, what?”

Because you’ve never, in the real world, observed the pattern “tall guys wear blue shoes,” you feel, just there, that some sort of wool is being pulled over your eyes.

I appreciated his point, but it also made me appreciate how crucial specificity is to writing. While Tom’s blue shoes may not ring true in that sentence, there is something magical if we fine-tune the sentence a bit:

We all found it odd that tall Tom wore his blue shoes.