Afghan

When I'm having a really horrid day, I will often intentionally dig out an afghan knitted by my grandmother and flop down on the couch with a book and some classical music and just feel wrapped in a little serenity. Doesn't last long around here, but I like being wrapped in something she made . . . it feels very comfortable.

Yesterday, I told this guy [and visit the link if you want to join the Storytellers and flex your short story muscles] how incredible it felt to be working on something where the voice just comes . . . where it's so comfortable. For whatever reason, that voice often comes to me in a "neighborhood" lingo, the world where my father grew up. The world of The Roofer.

I guess kids are like sponges. I used to go to NYC with him and hang out all day with his buddies in a bar when I was as young as five or six. It's a bar that's now gone, the kind bar that's tough to find now--in an actual endangered neighborhood of former tenements. I learned a lot of bar tricks--like juggling coasters. I saw drunks with their heads on the bar . . . missing teeth. The bathroom had a single bar bulb and often smelled like puke. Ahh, those were the good old days of my childhood. I adored every single second of it. EVERY second. It was what we did on Sundays. It was better than anything my father ever did with me. Better than Brownies. Better than playing catch. I'd dare say, it was better than Disneyland.

And somehow . . . when it's time to find a certain street voice, it's like wrapping that afghan around me. It just happens. It's a rhythm, a patter, a way of even moving when I type, even, a certain way I cock my head.

My guess is we all have an afghan voice. It's the one we slip into so well that we just type and after a half hour wonder, "Well, where did all THAT come from?"

What's interesting to me, though . . . is that some writers don't KNOW they have an afghan voice. They haven't quite found it. They work at genres they have no feel for (if you have ever read a work in progress of someone attempting YA who really has no feel for young people, then you know what I mean). Their VOICE, their afghan voice is "right there" and so obvious, except, perhaps, to them. I can rattle off two blog writers I think would make awesome middle-grade writers. That's not what they're writing . . . but I think they have it in them.

So . . . what's your afghan voice? Which world do you slip into effortlessly?

What's Different?

Another great quote:

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like.

Tell them what makes this one different.

Neil Gaiman

I love this quote because this goes along with discussions about detail here at the blog. When I described John's Bar in The Roofer, I didn't just tell readers it was a Hell's Kitchen bar. Unless you've been to a bar there, that description would actually be rather useless. Instead, I described the patina of nicotine, how you could use your fingernail to scratch your name into the wall. I remember standing there, another wake, another time years ago, and I had been away from the bar for years, and when I found I could literally write with my nail in the nicotine stains, which had the drips of Jackson Pollack and the color of diseased lung, coating the walls, I knew I needed to write about the walls. What made them different from the walls of most bars. When I wrote about the smell . . . a combination of urine and vomit permeating the bathroom--with a single bare bulb in it . . . well, it was home. I love the place. Loved it (past tense) since it has now closed. We "waked" the bar. Honest to God. We said good-bye to it--and the place was packed so deep at the wake that you couldn't walk.

So there it is. What's different? When I speak to kids, I tell them to banish words like pretty from their writing. Evil. Strange. Eerie. Bizarre. Ugly. All meaningless. Utterly meaningless. A beautiful place full of memories for me--truly wonderful memories--would likely be a place most of you reading this would rather run from, a bar whose door you would never darken without bringing along your own security detail. You certainly wouldn't want to use the restroom. Or touch anything. Or order food, heaven forbid. To make it come alive, I have to tell people what's different.

So what makes your hero different? Your heroine? Your setting? What's different? Is this a concept you use when writing?