Precision Power

Detail is everything

In July this year I will celebrate – if that’s the right word – forty years of being an English teacher. It’s still a job I love, although my second career as a writer is now running it close! I often tell my students that if I had to boil down all the advice I’ve handed out (sought or otherwise) over the years into one word, that word would be ‘precision’: precision of expression, precision in the technical details such as spelling and punctuation, precision in choice of quotation and precision of analysis.

It’s a shame I don’t always follow my own advice! When I went back over some of the first draft of my work-in-progress, I came across a lot of vagueness: amorphous abstract nouns, generalised expression, and a lack of clarity in description. Oh dear. I’d told myself as I was writing that I was just getting the story down and would go back and put in the specifics. And now that time has come. Readers don’t just want to know a character is happy – they want to feel the bubble of joy fizzing in their belly, hear the soaring optimism in their voice, imagine the exuberance in their limbs as they run. In short, there is no room for laziness: I need to dig deep and find that precision. Otherwise I’m going to end up with a very lacklustre novel.