When I first started working on my current novel, I gave my main character, the irrepressible Whitman Edison Kovacs, this apartment to live in:
Whit lived in a second-story apartment over the world’s saddest, smallest car dealership. By the foot of the old bridge, what could have been a boardwalk park among the cattails of a riverbank lay, instead, locked under asphalt onto which forty used cars leaked various effluents. As long as Whit looked straight out from his windows, never down, he had a lovely view of the Raritan as it rose and fell with the tides downstream. In the low tide hours, when Whit could smell the sea on the river’s breath, white-winged birds congregated on long, muddy sandbar islands, only to fly into the trees, one or two at a time, as ground beneath them diminished, then vanished when evening called the tide back in.
If he looked down—used cars, stained parking lot—well, it was just better not to.
It has promise. The person who lives there, that way, is in denial about the bad and fixated on what truly is good. That might have been my boy Whit. I was about to write an entire working draft with him in that habitat.
