Specificity versus the generic

Birthdays

It’s my birthday today! I unashamedly take birthdays very seriously—my own, and everyone else’s, no matter the age.

I find birthdays wonderful, and not only because of the cake and presents. I love the very premise of them—we’ve collectively agreed to set aside one day a year for each person, and to celebrate them specifically.

There are many things I like to do on my birthday, or during my birthday weekend (I stand by this!): I get an iced chai latte from a certain coffee shop. I wear one of my favorite summer sundresses. I listen to summer music and blow bubbles on the sidewalk. I eat chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and strawberries. And I write, because it makes me feel more connected to myself and to others.

As I’m celebrating this day, in the ways that are important to me, and thinking about birthdays as the most ordinary, joyful argument for specificity we have, I’m coming back to an artistic note I’ve been giving writers and artists quite a lot lately.

Specificity makes a piece of art stand out

In my work, I see the generic all the time. It’s common to read manuscripts where two characters have a long conversation and nothing in it tells me who either of them is. The dialogue is clean, grammatical, and sometimes funny, but it could be lifted out and dropped into any other manuscript without anyone noticing. It’s not unusual to see an illustration brief that says “a girl and her pet cat”, and what comes back is exactly that: a girl, a cat, competently rendered, yet belonging to no one specific. There aren’t details that say this girl, and this cat.

This is the hardest kind of work to critique, because there’s often nothing wrong with it, exactly. It’s just that it could be anyone’s. It could be any story, any character, any day in any life.

The generic in storytelling is rarely a failure of skill, but I think it’s a lack of attention. Something general is something that’s safe. It’s the placeholder that’s reached for when a writer or artist hasn’t decided, or hasn’t tried to decide, who this character actually is, and what their world is. It’s possible, and even common, to finish a whole story or an entire portfolio with placeholders.

The specific is the universal

I think some creators believe that the barer a character or a piece is, the more room there is for a reader or viewer to map themselves and their own experiences onto it. But the opposite is true: the more specific you get, the more universal the work becomes.

A character who “wants love” is no one. A character who wants her best friend to call her back before Monday morning, because she needs a shoulder to cry on after a break-up, who keeps picking up a phone she’s promised herself she won’t check until she shoves it in her messy closet, is recognizable, because it’s exact. There are details that make a character whole, not empty.

Readers won’t connect with a character because the character is an identical copy of the person. Readers connect when they see a character they recognize, which only comes from creating a character, or a setting, or a conversation that does the work of feeling real and authentic.

I try not to simply say “add more detail,” in edit or art notes. I try to be exact in explaining what needs to happen, and why. Specificity isn’t about adding more in order to check a box. It’s about intentional selection. The details that work are the ones that are particular components of a fully realized character.

This is true in illustrations, too. Specificity in a piece of art is what makes it come alive, and what distinguishes it as the artist’s. This is how illustrators stand out, in their portfolios and their pieces—they create work that could only come from them.

Question as you create

If you’re making something right now, I have questions that you can ask of yourself, and of your work—as always, honestly and unflinchingly, even if the answer means you have to go back and revise.

When you look at what you've written, do you see a character, or do you see a type, with a name added on? Do you see a world, or an accumulation of random elements that you added for the sake of finishing a scene? Is your art showing a personality, or completing a prompt?

Take it line by line. Each piece of dialogue, each scene, each flourish, and ask, could it belong to any character in any story, or only to this one? Is there enough in how each character speaks, in what they notices, in the single object on the shelf, for a reader to point and say, that's “this character, I'd know them anywhere?” If a line would sound the same coming from another character, it isn't theirs yet. If the visual scene would look the same in another book, it isn't this world yet.

Flannery O’Connor said, “the longer you look at a single object, the more of the world you see in it.” Her whole argument was that the specific isn’t the opposite of the big, universal feeling. It’s the only aperture wide enough to let that feeling through.

Why we celebrate one at a time

In storytelling, it’s not enough to say that a character likes cake on their birthday. What flavor of cake, and what kind of frosting, and what do those details say about their personality, their history, their ideals? Why does the character choose a particular outfit—not just because “it’s their favorite,” but what that clothing makes them feel about themselves when they wear it, and how they want to be seen. What music is on their playlist, and why?

This is why we celebrate birthdays the way we do, as opposed to one enormous party for all of humanity. We take note of individuals, and what makes them precisely and uniquely them. We are all specific. And so is good art.