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If we want to build influence and thought leadership, conveying mere information doesn’t help. We need to become impactful storytellers. And while ‘storytelling’ itself is a rabbit hole, let’s talk about one aspect that can inject a ton of personality into your stories. This one aspect adds depth to your stories, helping them resonate deeply with the audience. Specificity. Vagueness, the opposite of specificity, makes stories a lot less impactful. Vague stories don’t stick. Let’s take an example. “I went to a coffee shop. I talked to the barista and ordered my regular coffee”. As you read this sentence, how do you feel? What do you envision? What movie plays inside your head? Every time we read (or hear) a sentence, a movie is played in our minds. Whether we like it or not. The contents of this movie will depend on the words used in the sentence. If the sentence is vague, so is the movie. If the movie is vague, so is the resonance. What could be a more specific version of the above scenario? “I went to Starbucks. I spoke to Rajesh, the barista, and ordered an Americano. I also requested some almond milk on the side.” Ah, the movie got more specific, didn’t it? The Barista, who was vague earlier, is now much more concrete. The Barista now has a name, gender, and even a nationality. The coffee shop has become ‘Starbucks’, making it much easier to visualize where I am. The coffee also became specific. It has transformed into an Americano with almond milk on the side. Being specific makes the story more visual. Okay, but how do we apply this? All this is nice, but as a writer and creator of stories, how do we apply specificity to our writing? In other words, how can we take our vague writing and find ways to make it specific? What does the actual process look like? Because knowing something and being able to apply it are two different ball games altogether. (As an aside – As a kid, I knew a lot about Cricket. I was an expert who knew statistics, the weaknesses of different players, and all the theories. But when it came to playing cricket, I was so bad. Oh, so very bad.) A mistake that cripples us One mistake I see fellow writers and storytellers make is wanting to achieve two tasks simultaneously. They want their idea and the perfect expression of that idea to be done together. Mistake. Huge mistake. These are 2 separate tasks—two separate entities.
You cannot create an idea and express it effectively simultaneously. It’s criminal. Forget about specificity (for now) Step 1 is taking the idea from your head in its purest form. This means that you write without editing. No judgment. Not using the backspace key at all. The goal here is to get the first draft out. Keep typing till you find exactly what you want to say. Going back to the sentence I wrote earlier, it’s unlikely that this emerged from the first draft – “I went to Starbucks. I spoke to Rajesh, the barista, and ordered an Americano. I also requested some almond milk on the side.” No. No. No. The first draft probably looked something like – “I went to a coffee shop. I talked to the barista and ordered my regular coffee”. Or maybe something even worse than that. While writing the first draft, I was not thinking about ‘how I wanted to say it’; I was only thinking about ‘what I wanted to say.’ It was only on the next day when I started the editing process, that I would re-visit the sentence and think, ‘Hmmm, this sounds quite vague. Can I make this more specific?'” It’s like doing a sweep Once the first draft is out, you can review what you have written. During this exercise, you can find the vague parts and infuse them with concreteness. Pro tip – ChatGPT can help in finding areas that are vague.
All you need to do is wear the ‘specificity specs‘ and find areas that can be tweaked. |
