#WorkshopWednesday: Dirt

Illustrative excerpts for this post are all from College Town, available now.

As an artist, I have a deep-seated love for lovely things. For sherbet sunsets, and freshly-unfurled flower petals; wrought iron benches, and dainty blue and white china plates, little teacups on saucers. Gleaming cherry muscle cars with Big Block engines, and glossy-coated, well-muscled horses with arched necks and uphill toplines. French chateaux and sprawling Queen Anne Victorian houses with two-story verandas. Who doesn't love lovely things? There is a wonderful satisfaction, as a writer, in sketching those lovely things with words and bringing them to life in vivid detail on the page. 

But it's the dirt that makes a story feel real. It's imperfections, and flaws, and the grunge of life that takes a book from something nice and makes it feel like a habitable place into which the reader can step, and stay. Especially if you're writing fantasy, or even a rather over the top contemporary concept, like, say, a motorcycle club, or a mafia. 

Every time I read a book that fails to fully engage me, I can usually point to a lack of grit. And I don't mean grit as in "badass-ness" or whatever it is people attribute that word to thematically speaking; I'm talking actual grit. Like when you open a door and the bottom of it scuffs over the floor and makes that teeth-clenching gritty sound of dirt grinding under the weight of it. Life is dirty, in so many ways. It's finding dog hair in your bra, and slopping a bucket of water down your leg; it's tracking mud across the carpet, and hastily throwing miscellaneous crap under the bed and into the closet before company arrives. That grab in your chest and stomach when the doorbell rings and you ask yourself "oh, crap, did I remember to scrub the toilet bowl?"

Writers are tasked with creating "likeable" characters, and that is...wildly open-ended. We all like different things. We all value different qualities in friends, in romantic partners. One of the decisions I made early on was that I wasn't going to a) put real human faces on my book covers; and b) talk about celeb crushes or guys I thought were cute. Why? Because it was irrelevant. A writer has to be able to create a very specific vision that somehow appeals to a broad audience, and that's difficult when you account for differing taste. The trick, I think, is, as I've mentioned in a previous post, to make the characters endearing, and also to layer in the dirt. To use character-specific details in a way that make a character feel real. It's much easier to like a real person than a pretty, two-dimensional cutout. 

It's important to me that readers know that every single scene in every single one of my books is written in a character's voice, rather than my own. Whoever's showing us the scene, whoever's eyes we're looking through, the picture his colored by his or her biases and tastes. If someone is described as beautiful, it's because the POV character thinks they are, not that he or she is a supermodel - except for Raven, of course. For instance, I've always found it genuinely hilarious that readers took stars off their reviews or griped at length about Walsh (and Fox) not being tall enough "for them." He isn't for them, though; he's for Emmie.

 Admittedly, at this point, I'm having fun pointing out that Walsh and Fox aren't very tall - that's my inner troll coming out - but their height also plays into the core of their character. In Lord Have Mercy, there's a scene where Alex is standing in Walsh's living room with him, and feeling more than a little intimidated, and it's something he marvels over. Alex is the larger of the two, physically, but Walsh is the more imposing. I love Devin's boys - Tommy, Miles, Phil, and Tenny are all almost six feet; they can have some height, as a little treat - being the sort no one expects: they don't look like a threat, until you've got a gun in your face. But the other thing is...a club, like a family, like a community, a neighborhood, a church, like any gathering of people, is going to have all sorts. Huge, hulking Mercys, and jockey Walshes; Tiny Dancers, and Hot Dumbasses like Aidan. Old Timers, and Dipshits, and Good Little Soldiers. "Alexa, play 'All Kinds of Kinds' by Miranda Lambert." 

Despite being someone who is deeply displeased with my own face, it's important, when I write, to sketch in the laugh lines, and the frown lines. The little gray hairs. Freckles and tan lines. The nervous tics, the bad habits; the bitten nails, and the cigarette habits, and the coffee breath. The flares of temper, and the inappropriate jokes at inopportune moments. The way the corners of jean back pockets get threadbare; a mustard stain on a shirt. It translates to landscapes, too; to houses. 

The siding on the back, where there’s less sun, is mildewed, green patches screed over the buttercup yellow his mother picked out some thirty years ago. The back deck sags in the center, and needed a fresh coat of Thompson’s Water Seal at least three years ago. The chimney brick needs repointing, and the once-tidy flower beds along the back walk now grow scraggly with weeds. The brown tips of last year’s leaves peek out of the gutters, and there’s a crack in one of the upstairs windows he hasn’t noticed before.

The place looks derelict. It’s clean inside, because he and Mom and their hired help, Nancy, ensure that it is, but Lawson knows all the furnishing and fixtures are badly out of date. Mom watches all those home reno shows where happy married couples demo and redo houses, but they’ve lacked the funds for such an endeavor, or the personal know-how and time to do it themselves.

Lawson kills the engine and then grips the wheel with sweaty palms. “So. Here we are.” When he dares to glance over, he sees that Tommy’s frowning.

“I know it looks like hell,” he begins, and Tommy interrupts him.

“Where’s the ramp?”

“What?”

“Your dad.” Tommy gives the back of the house a narrow-eyed once-over and then lowers his gaze to meet Lawson’s. “He’s in a wheelchair, you said. You need a ramp.”

“Oh. Yeah. We were gonna get one, but the contractor bailed, so…”

“You couldn’t build one?”

“I tried.” 

You have to balance the lovely with the dirty. The cracks in the sidewalk; the weeds in the yard; the crumpled potato chip bag tumbling in the breeze. 

Dartmoor has always been grungy in a very specific, biker way, so much so that the world feels so very familiar that sketching the whole picture - from sunset to flaking porch paint - feels like second nature. College Town was a new and engaging challenge because though it was, technically, a mafia book, and the attendant opulence and finery and danger was present, the story was told entirely from an outsider, civilian POV, through Lawson, and Lawson's life is mired in all the ordinary "dirt" of suburban life. Tommy is probably conventionally attractive, but he's beautiful to Lawson because of their history, and the love there, and so the narrative is necessarily biased. 

“They didn’t have welcome home hats,” Dana explained, snapping one onto Lawson’s head as he climbed out of the car. “So birthday it is.”

She hung back and let Lawson get the walker, and then help Tommy up to his feet so that he was standing beside the car, holding onto the walker’s handles. Then she stepped in and, much more carefully than she had with Lawson, settled a hat on Tommy’s fluffy hair and delicately tucked the elastic band under his chin.

Tommy smiled, small and bashful, and reached up to adjust it, his new ring gleaming in the sunlight. He was pale and stubbled, and still sickly and shaking, just a little, and he was the most beautiful thing Lawson had ever seen.

In everything I write, the dirt - the flaws, the tics, the lines, the mildew, the nicotine stains; all of it - is objective, but the beauty is very subjective. The dirt is the necessary groundwork that allows the author to reveal the beauty - of the story itself, of the characters, of the setting - in a way that ends up feeling inevitable, immutable, and universal, despite its inherent subjectivity. 

That's a long way of saying: when you sit down to write a story about something beautiful, don't forget to get your hands dirty. That sounds so terribly cliche, but it's cliche for a reason. If your story feels lifeless, scoop up a big handful of dirt and grind it in.