"The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be."

What do grit, oysters and oath-swearing show (and tell) us about writing?

I hope you found the Ten Wise Sayings About Creative Practice that I gathered a couple of months ago useful - and now I have to ’fess up: I deliberately left one out, because I wanted to think about it properly. It’s by the photographer Diane Arbus, who attributed to her teacher Lisette Model the idea that

The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.

Which does sound odd, when you think about it, especially if you know that Arbus is famous for taking photographs of ‘strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism’ and people with learning disabilities: people whose outer, photographable presence is not at all general.