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?