Your accent, your neighborhood, your family’s weird phrases. That’s material nobody else has.

What is ordinary to you is exotic to almost everyone else. The way your family says a particular word, the thing only people from your area do, the rhythm of how your relatives argue: you have heard it so often that it registers as nothing. To a reader or listener it is specific and alive, and specificity is the scarce resource. Most people sand that off while trying to sound professional.

Write down ten phrases that are normal in your house and nowhere else. Put one into whatever you are making, without translating it for outsiders. Then see whether people lean in rather than get lost.