The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Those Voices in Your Head

Monday, May 24, 2010

Those Voices in Your Head

One of the main reasons teens dislike certain authors is, according to my entirely random survey, "They never sound like anyone I know." I think it's really difficult to get down authentic teenspeak; in fact, I think it's really difficult to get down any human dialogue that sounds authentic. But dialogue makes or breaks a story: if the writer lacks a good ear, it becomes dreary reading.

To some degree, you have to prune dialogue. I have this weird knack of remembering fairly long passages of conversation (and then forgetting to pick up ketchup two shopping trips in a row). Here is an actual dialogue that took place in my house on a Sunday morning:

Emma: "Mom, did you know that the juice of a dandelion root will remove moles?"

Mom: "How do you know that? And why would you want to?"

Emma: "I looked it up. It's right on Google."

Mom: "I'm beginning to think that you have too much free time. And you don't have moles."

Dad: "We have moles? Where? In the garden?"

Emma: "But I could get moles. You get moles when you get old. I never want moles."

Dad: "I haven't seen any moles and I was outside clearing brush."

Christopher: "Who ate the rest of that pizza?"

Emma: "You did. Duh."

Christopher: "I thought there was a piece left."

Emma: "You have to boil the dandelion root."

Mom: "Do you drink it or put it right on the moles?"

Dad: "Is that what moles eat? Dandelions?"

Christopher: "Are there any pizza rolls in the freezer?"

Dad: "You know moles are also spies..."

And so it went.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story was "life, with the dull parts taken out."

I think the same applies to dialogue, maybe even more so.

Right now, I have changed the dialogue on a new YA no less than 17 times. I haven't written more than three pages in any one "voice", but none of them make me go, "Yeah, that's what she sounds like." I jot down different opening sentences that I think will fit this girl, but I think I'm having so much trouble because she's not really present in my mind. I'm going to put this idea away for a time, and wait for it to happen.

My guess is that writing good dialogue, dialogue that advances the plot and fleshes out the characters, rises from listening to those voices in your head of characters that don't exist - at least not yet.

I'm wondering how many centuries ago they would have burned you at the stake for admitting that.

9 comments:

Marcia said...: Well, if the purpose of dialogue is to make 'em laugh, you did. I think your family's discussion is a riot.; Monday, 24 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: That's how it went while we were making pancakes for the kids on a Sunday morning. Everyone is sort of in their own little weekend orbit.

Yes, they would make funny dialogue, but our story - dishes, laundry, school, work, is a pretty dull one...; Monday, 24 May, 2010
Roland D. Yeomans said...: Dialogue is hard to write naturally. And when you're doing age groups from the one in which you find yourself moored in -- it is surely a challenge.

You have a lovely blog. Come visit mine, WRITING IN THE CROSSHAIRS, if you have the time, Roland; Monday, 24 May, 2010
Glynis Peters said...: I think that is what has put me off writing YA. I am not sure I would get the voice right.

LOL your conversation sounded like my life before they all flew the nest. Just add an extra girl in there.; Tuesday, 25 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Hey, Roland - great name! Thanks, I'll visit soon.

I think that the voice is, by far, the most difficult aspect of writin YA, Glynis. It makes or breaks the story.

An extra girl! Yikes, Emma is more than I can handle. I give you credit.; Tuesday, 25 May, 2010
Glynis Peters said...: LOL Anne, my extra girl is called Emma!!; Tuesday, 25 May, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: I love the way everyone in your family was thinking of something a little different. We have conversations like that ALL the time, especially when I'm on the computer, but still trying to stay in touch with the rest.

Now I'm wondering if they'll ever be able to program moles' DNA so they'll only eat dandelion roots? That would be so cool.; Tuesday, 25 May, 2010
Carolina M. Valdez Schneider said...: I love writing dialogue. I've contemplated writing plays and screenplays because I love it so much, but yes, it's not the easiest to make it feel genuine. But perhaps you're right--perhaps we only need to listen to those voices in our head a little more closely ;); Tuesday, 25 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Is there another name for a girl, Glynis?

I've always loved that name, since I discovered Jane Austen. Conveniently, it was also her paternal grandmother's name. I had no idea it would ever become so popular.

Yes, Mary, multitasking is really just another term for not fully focusing on any one thing. And they can't program moles to do that- what will happen when Emma gets old? She needs those dandelions to cure her moles. (I have moles; I'm sure she looked at me and went, "Oh, no -- is that my future?")

I love writing dialogue, too Carolina - and welcome! But I only love it when it sounds perfect, when I can pretty much hear the characters saying the lines. Otherwise, it's just dreadful.; Wednesday, 26 May, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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