Prose is like designing an animal—it works better when the muscles are hidden and you only touch fur. So I though it’d be fun to dissect some prose from my upcoming novel Mantids and explain what made me draw that particular hoof that way. The paragraph below happens in an Astoria, Oregon nudie bar where the narrator’s wife works. It’s basically scene-setting, a 360-degree scan to let the reader know where they’ve been plopped down. First, the excerpt in its entirety:

Yep—just your basic classic twat fest complete with sneaking zippers and weeping drunks, all being hustled in a disco-mirrorific room that reeks from bleach—that smell that warns you you’re def wading into the gene pool. Meaning that smoky pit lined with vending machines—get yourself some lube or an inflatable date. They never do get the mouths right. But why hump rubber when you could watch working puss, the grim taco, the leaking mango itself—especially since today was Jobless Tuesday! Yay! Meaning lap dances were half off and they’d cash your unemployment check right at the bar. Mook, being jobless in Astoria is a birthright—countless immigrant Finns beached here and clear-cut the sky for decades, dreaming on that ripe day when unemployment checks would be mailed straight to their favorite nudie bar, dropped right next to that frosty Bud dripping on a pile of no-contact orders. All while some thong-addled third cousin shoved muff right over their nostrils and coaxed their trouser shark out. But I didn’t come here to blow my load—for one thing, these chicks weren’t exactly supermodels—nope—these were discount rent‑a‑babes, the kind with ratted wigs and bench warrants and a puking brat somewhere at home. The place had the subtle charm of a food bank.

Let’s examine the “crunchy” dialect I use in Mantids to mirror working-class, Northwest American English. American English, with its varied cultural roots (Yiddish, Irish, Native, Asian, African, you name it) consistently boils itself down into words with either single syllables or interior rhyme, assonance and aggressive vowel/consonant blends. Credit cards become plastic that you max out, Crack heads maybe switch to tweak, bling gets tossed in grills to agitate gangbangers, etc. It ain’t a soft language. So in Mantids I strived to replicate this crunchy dialect from the mouth of a lower-class white male. “But why hump rubber when you could watch working puss?”

There’s assonance in the first sentence: “basic classic twat fest” or aa-ih ah-ee ah eh set into a rumba rhythm. Hey, my roots are in poetry—I do listen. Next, there’s overstatement—why is this fest basic and classic? Are we implying a modernist stylization to this nudie milieu? Couple this with the rude language—“the grim taco, the leaking mango itself” ain’t gonna make anyone’s PC list—and you have a prole slant on a common feature of the strip-mall landscape. Not how you’d describe the bar to your Mom, but maybe how you’d tell a pal about it.

Next, there’s overstatement, absurdity and historical over-reach. Consider this chunk:

. . . countless immigrant Finns beached here and clear-cut the sky for decades, dreaming on that ripe day when unemployment checks would be mailed straight to their favorite nudie bar, dropped right next to that frosty Bud dripping on a pile of no-contact orders. All while some thong-addled third cousin shoved muff right over their nostrils and coaxed their trouser shark out . . . . The place had the subtle charm of a food bank.

Finns actually are a major immigrant group in Astoria. Absurdly, they didn’t clear-cut the sky—no one gets paid for sawn air—but it’s a telegraphing of the effects of clear cutting. Why is the day “ripe”? Probably it smells worse that way. Add in the familial breakdown of “no-contact orders” coupled with the incest reference of “thong-addled third cousin” and the “subtle charm of a food bank” and you’d swear the author has a class bias. Nope—just a comic view of his own roots. I hope the above helps you take apart your own fave paragraphs in varied works. Just remember kids—Derrida to the contrary—most of us in the working-text trenches do hear the subtle echoes in our own prose.