My Favorite Writing

It's hard to pick one favorite piece of writing, but among them is definitely "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," by Neil Gaiman.

I always enjoy Gaiman's short stories.

Two innocent main characters, young boys, go looking for girls at a party, and the scene slowly becomes more and more bizzare.

I like Gaiman's vivid descriptions. 

For example, he describes "narrow houses," "rusting cars," "concreted front gardens," "dusty glass" and "alien spices" all in the same sentence.

Descriptions like that conjure sights, smells, and almost leave me feeling the dust in my nostrils.

The author also gives insight into his characters through narration.
Enn, the narrator, uses the word contradictory and thinks, "[i]t was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory."

Little details like this reveal Enn's youth and naivete, also explaining why he seems oblivious to the otherworldliness of the scene.

At one point, a clearly alien girl says, "'[t]he last tour, we went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales.'"

The narrator follows up, unphased and innocent, and wonders if she is American.

This kind of subtle humor is characteristic of Gaiman's style.

He likes to give a very normal human situation a supernatural twist, and often the reader does not know whether this alien occurrence is normal to the world of the narrator, or whether it is simply being overlooked.

The writing style mesmerizes me, and I always wonder exactly what the reality of the main character is like.

I found this piece at http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories/How_To_Talk_To_Girls_At_Parties/How_To_Talk_To_Girls_At_Parties_(Text).