Trade Generality for Particularity

Midway through an argument about how much living costs, Walden stops to itemize the price of Thoreau’s house. Boards, $8.03½, “mostly shanty boards.” Refuse shingles for the roof and sides, $4.00. Laths, $1.25. A thousand old bricks, $4.00. Hair, thirty-one cents, annotated “More than I needed.” Transportation, $1.40, annotated “I carried a good part on my back.” The total is $28.12½. He explains himself: very few people can say exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still the cost of each material.

The claim the ledger serves is general and easy to wave away, that a person can have a shelter for life at a cost no greater than a year’s rent. Stated plainly it would be an opinion. Itemized, it can be checked line by line, and felt in the body: hair, more than he needed.

A general draft sounds nothing like that. The house was neglected. She was furious. Costs are rising for working families. Each sentence hands over a conclusion the writer has already drawn, and the reader, who has seen nothing, can only accept or reject it, or hand it back. A particular is evidence, and the conclusion a reader draws from it is the reader’s own. Writers fall into generality honestly, because the general is where the thought arrived, and drafting tends to keep the verdict and drop the evidence that produced it. The writer remembers how the house felt, and not the state of its gutters.

A particular is something a stranger standing in the place could see, hear, handle, count, or check, and a good one is short, the right few facts with no ornament. An invented world turns credible through specific, consistent detail, because specificity signals that someone knows. A factual world turns intelligible when its abstractions are tied to a number, a name, an object, a date. Particulars also put a claim at risk. In nonfiction a number or a name can be wrong and can be caught, which may be why vagueness is so comfortable, and why in reporting and memoir precision is a matter of accuracy as well as of style.

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels does the invented case with unusual economy. Before Gulliver meets anything impossible, the book gives him a departure date (May 4, 1699, from Bristol), a captain and a ship (William Prichard, the Antelope), a latitude (30 degrees 2 minutes south), and a death toll (twelve of the crew). Then comes a creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow. The premise is absurd, and Lilliput is scaled with the same steady bookkeeping: the tallest horses and oxen four to five inches, sheep an inch and a half, geese about the bigness of a sparrow.

Particulars can also go wrong, as Virginia Woolf argues in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924). She quotes pages of Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways: the canal, the flour-mill, a row of houses called Freehold Villas, a terrace built by the heroine’s grandfather, the teapot manufacturer, and the difference between copyhold and freehold land. All the while, Woolf complains, Hilda is still looking out of the window. Bennett has made a house, she says, and hopes we will therefore imagine a person living in it; he has “never once looked at Mrs. Brown,” the stranger Woolf imagines in a railway carriage. This is a rival novelist’s polemic, written by someone who wanted fiction to go elsewhere, so read it as one side of an argument about Bennett; a reader fond of Bennett’s Five Towns could answer that the houses are the character. Her test holds either way. Do the particulars lead into a person, or stand in for one? Details unconnected to what the work is about are just more stuff, and choosing among them is selection (Practice 13).

Practice. Take one page of a current draft and underline five sentences that state a quality instead of presenting a fact: angry, neglected, expensive, tense, important. For each, write a replacement that names something a stranger in the room could see, hear, handle, or count, with no quality word in it; in nonfiction, add a source or a figure you can point to. Reread the page with the replacements in. Keep each one that tells you something the general sentence did not, and restore the general sentence wherever the particular only added bulk, all within thirty minutes. If a general sentence has nothing to be replaced with, you have found a place where you do not yet know your material, and that is worth knowing (Practice 14). Write the number of surviving replacements in the margin; each should be as checkable as thirty-one cents for hair.