Detail Exercises Details, Details, Details Reading most writing, including mine, it seems that it is easier to be abstract than to be specific.
Abstracts condense many details into one generality.
It takes less space to mention my garden than to mention my carrots and cabbage and baby tomatoes and nasturtiums and basil and thyme. There are no trees in vivid poems and stories. There are slender young birches and spreading old oaks, dark green firs fuzzed with spring-green tips and fall maples tossing their leaves at you. There are elderly men in neat string ties walking in small, careful steps across marble floors and voluble, bearded taxi drivers who are studying physics in night school. One of the arts of writing is to compress much into a word.