If you had to escort a visitor from outer space for a 30-minute tour of your community, where would you begin and end?
Your move, writer.
Some writers will play this for comedy — the visitor turns out to be a nitpicky bureaucrat from a species that finds parking lots fascinating and school mascots deeply confusing, and the tour becomes a mishap-prone negotiation between what's impressive and what's just normal. Others might go tender: choosing the stops not to dazzle but to explain who you are, ending somewhere quiet and personal, like a kitchen table or a bench where something important once happened. There's also a wide-eyed angle, treating the alien as an excuse to fall back in love with your own town, noticing the bakery smell or the way light hits the water tower like you're seeing it fresh. And don't overlook the bittersweet route — the tour as a goodbye, the visitor leaving you wondering what you'd want a stranger to remember about home if they could only carry thirty minutes of it back into the stars.
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