That New Car Smell

by Cindy Layton

I’ve only owned a hand full of cars in my life. I don’t turn them over or lease them, so, when I get a new one, I tend to think of the cars that came before it. Each holds a place in my memory.

My first was a two-seater Karmann Ghia, a Volkswagen dressed up as a sports car. It really was just a Beetle in disguise, all ass-backwards with the engine in the rear. It lasted about six months before it caught fire on the highway and had to be towed off the road and out of my life. But what a great six months it was. To an eighteen-year-old girl, that car represented everything I wanted the world to think about me, except for the burning on the highway part.

But, as it relates to writing, it seems so obvious to say that certain objects would reveal so much about our story’s characters. Think of how a Mercedes driving CEO, weaving through traffic on the city streets, or a chain-smoking woman, driving a Chevy Chevette “Woodie” down an empty highway, might reflect on those characters’ personalities and values.

In writing, sometimes you need to go for the sympathy vote and use an object that speaks in a universal language. If, for example, I wrote a reflective piece about an eighteen-year-old girl driving an old VW two-seater, and I’m looking back in time, the reader might reminisce about that need to be cool, or remember their own inexperience in making such a buying decision. Maybe they’re not at all surprised to know the car didn’t last six months. Or maybe the reader will get a chuckle out of how fun those six months had been. They might think about their own first car. All the while they’ll feel something: wistfulness, nostalgia, perhaps a reconnection with their younger self?

But, if I’m writing in the world of an eighteen-year-old, I’m thinking only of the cool factor. It’s not old, it’s vintage. It’s the anti-parent car. It evokes youth and exuberance and a live-for-today outlook on life. If my character arrives at school driving this car she’s eclectic, she’s fun-loving, she’s adventurous. There’s not a thought given to the idea that maybe the car won’t survive the next six months. If you’re eighteen you ask yourself – Do I know this girl? Can her life be my life?

The beauty is - the reader doesn’t have to have once owned a VW to know how any of that feels. Through marketing, through knowing the history of cars, through our own personal experiences, we relate to cars in a near universal way.

So that’s a long way of saying that cars are one object in writing that, yes, gives information about your character to the reader but, at the same time, may also evoke a higher level of connection and resonance. *

Writers, what other objects are there that help create that deeper level of resonance in our writing?

*I am obsessed with the idea of resonance in writing ever since I watched Jonny Geller give a Ted Talk on What Makes a Best Seller.