The inverse rule of “Specificity is the Secret,” is “The Broader You Are, The More Confusing You Are.” Once you understand the role specificity plays in highly effective writing, you will start to see it everywhere. “I want to learn how to cook” is broad. “I want to learn how to cook Chicken Tikka Masala” is more specific. “I’m looking to buy a car” is broad. “I’m looking to buy an electric car” is more specific. “I like writing about sports” is broad. “I like writing about basketball and the qualities all great players have in common” is more specific.

Somewhere along the line, a writer woke up in the morning and thought, “You know, romance is a pretty big category. But I bet there are readers who only want to read romance novels in military settings.” All of a sudden, you as a reader have to make a very concrete choice: do you want to read any romance novel? Or do you want to read a romance novel where the main character is in the military? This is where, again, Specificity Is The Secret. The more specific you can be about why your new category is exactly what your target readers are looking for, the more likely it is readers will see this category of yours as unique and SEPARATE from any and all competition.

The real question you should never stop asking yourself is, “Could this be more specific?” Because the more specific you can be, the more likely you are to resonate with your target reader MORE than your competition.

The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.

When you remember these three basic things about readers in general-that they like suspense, that they want to see the story happen and, most important of all, that they want to feel the story happen-then you are ready to think about the particular reader.

That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.

When students write, they often generalize. I want them to be specific, so I ask them to imagine that they're creating a movie, that they're using a camera, and that they have to describe each shot for the listening audience. So I stress detail to overcome the hurdle of generalizing.

When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.

Part of it is finding your readers. Sometimes your readers don’t look like you, or come from your same background, but you get a sense of like, they know what I’m trying to do. They’re not telling me what they would do or telling me what their favorite poet would do. They’re telling me “Okay, based off the work you brought into this room, this is what I’m hearing.” That, to me, is such a generous way of reading because it’s reflecting back what you’re doing and you can figure out if it’s working or not. So, figure out who are your people…

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.

"The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into — if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes."