Make It Concrete
Proposes the specific in place of the category — “sleet” for “bad weather” — from your own material only.
Abstraction is a container with no contents. When you write "bad weather" or "a difficult childhood" or "some kind of tool," you've handed the reader a box and asked them to fill it themselves — and they will, with whatever their own history supplies, which is probably not what you meant. The move is to open the box: sleet, not bad weather. The thing that happened the February she turned nine, not a difficult childhood. The peavey hook, not some kind of tool.
The test is whether someone could sketch it. If they can't, you haven't written a detail yet — you've written a category, and categories belong in legal documents and taxonomies, not in sentences trying to do work on a reader.
Where this applies: anywhere you've written a noun that could describe a thousand different things. Anywhere the sentence feels vague to you on rereading. Anywhere you catch yourself using words like "various," "certain," "some," or "things."
Where it does not apply: when the category is genuinely what you mean — when scope, not specificity, is the point. "Every government that has ever fallen" is doing something a list of governments cannot. When the general is the argument, forcing a specific shrinks it. The other limit: this move only works with details you actually have. Invented specificity is a different move, with its own uses and its own risks. Concreteness drawn from your material earns trust; specificity that reads as decoration destroys it.
In practice
Weather as atmosphere
The weather made the drive miserable.
Sleet hit the windshield in long, diagonal streaks the wipers couldn't keep up with.
The revision gives the reader something to see and hear; the original only told them how to feel about an event they couldn't picture.
Vague emotion, domestic scene
She left some things on the table and walked out.
She left her keys, a half-eaten sleeve of crackers, and the note she'd started and crossed out, and walked out.
The specific objects do emotional work the abstract "things" refuses to do — the crossed-out note alone tells a small story.
Occupational detail
He had spent years doing physical work outdoors.
He had spent eleven years on bridge crews, his hands permanently creased with cable grease he couldn't fully wash out.
The years become countable, the work becomes a specific kind, and one physical detail makes the abstraction unnecessary.
Common questions
- What does it mean to make writing more concrete?
- Making writing concrete means replacing category words — "vehicle," "bad feeling," "some time ago" — with the specific thing from your actual material: the '94 pickup, the specific dread of an unopened envelope, last March. Concrete words name something a reader can picture; abstract words name a class of things and let the reader fill in the picture themselves, usually incorrectly.
- Can you be too specific in writing?
- Yes. Specificity earns its place when the detail is load-bearing — when it reveals character, advances action, or gives the reader something to anchor to. A specific that exists only to signal effort or authenticity reads as clutter. If you can remove a detail without losing anything the reader needed, the detail was decorating, not working.
- What's the difference between concrete and specific?
- Concrete means sensory — something you can see, touch, hear, taste, or smell. Specific means particular — one instance rather than the category. Most of the time they travel together: "the cracked vinyl seat" is both concrete and specific. But a number can be specific without being concrete ("seventeen attempts"), and a sensory detail can be concrete without being very specific ("something sour"). For prose, you usually want both.
- How do I find concrete details when I feel like I don't have any?
- Interrogate the abstraction: ask what kind, what color, what size, when exactly, how many, whose. If you're writing from memory or experience, the specific is usually there and was suppressed in favor of the easier general word. If you're writing about something you researched or imagined, the absence of a specific detail is information — it may mean you need to do more work before writing that sentence, or that the general is genuinely all you have.
Inside Verbaria
Verbaria's editor flags category-level nouns and vague quantifiers — "some," "various," "a number of," "things" — and prompts you to check whether your material holds a specific; the craft toolbox entry for Make It Concrete walks you through the interrogation questions that surface the detail you already know.
Where it comes from: Strunk & White's “definite, specific, concrete”; Hayakawa's ladder of abstraction (1949).
This is one of the tools inside Verbaria — the writing room that names the craft while you work. Read the writing.