The Private, the General, and the Specific

The best thing about really good advice is that you can get it—or give it—over and over again and it feels newly useful each time.  The very best advice should be welcomed:  you’ve heard it before but hearing it again is like an old friend whispering a secret in your ear that only they have earned the right to give.

Over the years I have received all manner of good advice from writing teachers, from editors, and of course from readers, but the best advice I ever got—the advice that I still give back to myself every time I am in the midst of a writing task—was given to me in a creative writing class when I was about 20.  Thankfully the story itself is many decades lost, but I remember what I was trying to do in it and I remember not only the good advice but the thinking process that it set off, which continues to this very day more than thirty years later.

It was a Civil War story, set in a dense cornfield.  My protagonist was a random young Union soldier who, stumbling blindly through the corn, accidentally kills a boy in gray only to discover, when he takes time to examine the body, that the dead boy looks exactly like him.  My instructor assumed I was making some awkward point about the self-defeating futility of war; while today I would say that it had overtones of Poe or Ambrose Bierce, at the time I think I was going for something vaguely Twilight Zone-inflected. 

         I called my soldier only The Private, and at some point in the story I think he had a brief encounter with a senior officer that I called The General.  Self-defeating futility of war aside, what I was going for was the idea that this tiny incident in the cornfield—or something like it, some strange and momentary encounter with the weird and unexplained—might happen to anyone at any time.  When it does, my story’s logic went, it might come and go too fast for us to assign meaning to it.

         I actually don’t remember the exact words that my teacher wrote on my story (this was back when we had to turn in paper copies of our writing and teachers scribbled personal notes in their own legitimate handwriting).  The gist of the comment, though, was something like this:  If you want to make something universal, you have to start by making it specific.

If you want to make something universal, you have to start by making it specific.

         This advice sounds simple, but for me it opened a world of choices.  To begin with, I felt somewhat seen to have it even assumed that I was trying to “make something universal”—I would never have put it that way myself.  I did think in terms of symbols and archetypes, though, and to my way of thinking you couldn’t have a very specific figure as an archetype.  What would even be the point?  And after all:  didn’t Stephen Crane populate The Red Badge of Courage with characters like The Youth and The Tall Soldier?  I assumed I was in good company.  I can’t remember whether I rewrote the story following this suggestion or felt insulted enough to ditch it and move on to something else, but I suspect it was the latter:  I vaguely remember the story of The Private in the cornfield but I have no memory of a version with any more detail than that.

         My teacher’s advice was right, though, and it has formed the backbone of all the creative writing courses I have ever taught and most of the writing tasks I have undertaken myself ever since.  Over and over I tell my students, and while doing so I remind myself:  Be specific.

         Also like most pieces of good advice, this one is (ironically) maddeningly vague.  Specific about what?  How specific?  And, most importantly:  what does this specificity (whatever it is) GET me?

         Writing teachers will point to famous characters as examples:  we ache for Gatsby’s doomed romanticism because of what we know and what we suspect about HIM, not about “a generic Jazz Age millionaire”; no one talks quite like Ahab; each of Joyce’s Dubliners has their own unique epiphany.  The triumphs and tragedies of their stories, the hypnotizing facets of their fates—these stay with us and drive us to re-read and re-teach and rethink because no one else is quite like them.

         My creative writing students’ default tends to go the other way.  Clinging almost violently to the maxim that they must only write what they know, my new writers often gleefully deploy small armies of interchangeable college kids doing almost nothing but generic college things.  “Matt and Kyle are college seniors.  They have been best friends since middle school.  One day Matt decides to ask Kyle about his plan to try out for the baseball team.”  My list of questions is the most random assortment of grasping for specifics:

         Where do they go to school?

         What unique foods, games, movies does each one like?

         Do they have different attitudes toward baseball?  Toward tryouts?  Toward ANYTHING?

         Of course, one benefit of starting with such a blank slate is that any amount of detail becomes suddenly magnified in its effect on other details.  A simple descriptive phrase like “those stupid athletic shorts he wore all the time” triggers images and associations, assumptions and predictions.  A careful writer is attuned to the threads that start to unspool from every such description; one detail suggests the need for more.  That example above, I might tell my students, provides us at least two interesting ideas to develop:  the first is obviously the fact that we have a character who for whatever reason wears athletic shorts all the time, and it’s easy to use this fact to brainstorm other eccentricities about him, but it’s ALSO useful that whoever made that observation called the athletic shorts “stupid.”  Since that’s not an objective fact of athletic shorts, the word “stupid” tells us something about the point of view of whoever is offering that hot take, and there’s a hint there of—what?  Irritation?  Dismissal?  Maybe even jealousy?  Now suddenly this single line has given us a springboard for more creativity, and now Matt and Kyle are on their way to being more fully realized individual characters. 

The real point here is that thinking carefully about specificity does not require a mountain of detail—but it does require awareness of the choices we make as writers. 

Thinking carefully about specificity does not require a mountain of detail—but it does require awareness of the choices we make as writers.

Wade Newhouse

A few careful choices, with some recognition of the doors those choices open for us, is the beginning of the distinction between writing as hobby and writing as craft.

Wade Newhouse is a Professor of English at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC.  He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on such diverse authors and topics as William Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, Civil War fiction, and the history of Dracula movies.  His short fiction has been published in HelloHorror, Lyonesse, Love Letters to Poe, and the Notch Publishing volume Sick Cruising.  He is a contributing writer at HorrorObsessive.com and will soon have some flash fiction appearing at SciFiShorts.co.

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