I've got a bit of a thing for industrial decay and I love this picture: I love the paint-peeling, flaky redundancy of the petrol pump, I like the fact that it is rusting and overgrown. I'm drawn to the forlorn.
In fact, I felt pretty forlorn a few months back when I filled up my car at a pump slightly more up-to-date than the one above, only to realise as soon as I had done it that I had put petrol in it instead of diesel.
OMG!
Which leads me, perhaps a little too neatly, to thoughts about appropriateness in writing. It's very important when you're starting out on a scene that you think carefully about matching your style to the subject you are writing about, unless you are trying to create a specific effect (perhaps I'll cover that in another post.) If you are writing an action-packed scene, it's a good idea to keep your sentences short and snappy as this will help to drive events along - if you attempt to describe high octane drama with sentences containing a million subclauses, in the style of Henry James, you will quickly come unstuck.. However, if you are writing something that is reflective or descriptive, trying to conjure up the interior landscape of someone's thinking, then short, snappy sentences would be completely out of place; something more meandering and complex would do the job far better.
A simple point, but something that you can easily overlook, just like I did. My car had to be towed to a disused airfield in the middle of Gloucestershire so that the tank could be pumped out. Using the wrong style in a scene or a story would destroy your work just as effectively as putting petrol in a diesel engine.
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