Writing place without trapping the story there
Why Regional Humor Travels Farther Than Its Zip Code
The more specific a story becomes, the less it needs to apologize for where it came from.
Local nouns can carry universal verbs
A regional story may contain a Publix sub, a hurricane shutter, a drawbridge and an alligator with poor respect for property lines. None of those details has to appear in a reader’s life for the story to feel familiar.
The nouns are local. The verbs are not.
People wait, worry, brag, improvise, misjudge, protect their children, defend their traditions and make decisions that seemed reasonable before witnesses arrived. A place gives those actions texture. The feeling lets them travel.
Regional humor works when readers recognize the human behavior even if they need a footnote for the sandwich.
Specificity is an invitation, not a fence
Writers sometimes sand away local detail because they want everyone to understand. The result is often a story that could have happened anywhere and therefore feels as though it happened nowhere.
A real street, food ritual, weather habit or family phrase gives the reader something solid to enter. Specificity creates trust. It suggests the writer was present long enough to notice what the brochure missed.
The reader does not need to share the detail. The reader needs to believe it.
Place makes the story particular. Recognition makes it portable.
Affection gives a writer permission to be sharp
Regional humor fails when the place is only a target. A parade of stereotypes may earn quick laughs, but it rarely earns a second reading. The writer sounds as though he stopped at the exit, collected three clichés and filed a report.
Affection does not require politeness. It requires relationship.
You can make fun of the storm ritual because you have stood in the hardware aisle beside people debating plywood as if national policy depended on it. You can write about Florida confidence because you have possessed it five minutes before discovering a problem with wings, teeth or a permit.
The sharpness feels different when readers know the writer is included in the joke.
A stereotype closes the door too early
Florida Man is a headline shape. Florida people are mechanics, teachers, parents, retirees, servers, newcomers, fifth-generation families and children who consider an alligator a reasonable subject for negotiation.
The stereotype says the strange person is over there. Recognition says the strange person may be holding your phone.
That second version travels farther because the reader has somewhere to stand.
Weather and wildlife are really pressure tests
Heat, storms and animals are not funny merely because they exist. They are funny because they apply pressure to ordinary plans.
A storm reveals who prepared, who forgot batteries and who has appointed himself neighborhood meteorologist. Wildlife reveals the speed with which an adult can abandon dignity while continuing to issue instructions. Heat reveals that every promise involving outdoor furniture was made under incomplete information.
The regional element creates the pressure. Character supplies the response.
That is one reason Florida behaves like its own literary genre. The state keeps arranging conditions under which people become unusually visible.
The story travels when the reader brings somebody with them
A reader in Ohio may never have defended Publix. They have defended something equally specific with an unreasonable amount of feeling. A reader in Oregon may not know the sound of a screen door before a Florida storm. They know the family sound that means weather, dinner or trouble has entered the house.
The local detail wakes up a memory that belongs to the reader. That is the trip regional writing is trying to make.
As Florida As It Gets is built from Florida material, but the deeper subjects are family, friendship, starting over, raising children, losing people and laughing at the evidence that we were not nearly as prepared as we believed.
The state provides the scenery and several of the animals. The recognition belongs to everybody.
More Florida, with the local details left in
The Florida Stories collection gathers essays about the state as it is lived, while As Florida As It Gets carries those observations through 55 pieces about family, food, weather, wildlife and home.