“I cannot tell you everything that we know. But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling. What you will see is an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior.”
- Colin Powell, describing the role of the novelist
(via Valerie Martin)
Valerie takes Powell’s words for the epigraph of her 2007 novel Trespass. Tonight she and Stanley Crawford gave readings at Amherst Books (she was my first writing instructor; he is teaching here at U Mass this semester).
She began her reading with the Powell quote, remarking that it was a terrific comment on fiction reading and writing.
Both she and Stanley read from dialogue-intensive scenes, and in both I was struck by how what characters wanted to talk about combined with their choice of words made them immediately recognizable and individual. Overly-particular speech patterns come off as fake; in my own drafts, too often it strikes me that the dialogue I’ve written errs in the opposite direction and could have been spoken by anyone (most likely, by me).
I meant to read Trespass went it came out. I’m excited to remedy that now.
