April Lindner, author of the debut novel JANE, tells Teenreads all about hearing voices. Not those kind of voices --- the kind that come from her characters. JANE is a modern take on the famous JANE EYRE, and after you've finished reading Lindner's post you will see the trailer for JANE. Enjoy!
Imaginary Friends
For most of my writing life, I’ve been a poet. I‘ve always devoured novels and hoped one day I might write one, but for a long time life had other ideas. In college, I fell under the spell of a poetry professor. She was warm and encouraging, with a wonderfully playful approach to writing. After taking her class, I still dabbled in fiction, but poetry was what I studied, published and taught.
Even so, I was always a little jealous of novelists. They get more attention and sell more books. Nobody ever makes a movie out of a poem. But apart from the remote potential for fame and success, there’s something else to envy: the relationship fiction writers get to have with their characters. I’ve heard novelist friends say that if a story is going really well its characters come to life and even talk to them. Ursula Hegi has written a wonderful novel called Intrusions in which a writer’s characters drop in for surprise visits and flat out refuse to behave the way she wants them to.
Poets get to have relationships with words and ideas, with music and images—but hardly ever with characters. To me, writing fiction sounded a little like having imaginary friends--not something most people over the age of five indulge in, but, even so, fun. And now that I’ve finally written a novel, I can say that characters really do speak to their authors. At least mine did. Once I immersed myself in their world, they made their voices heard, to the point where on a good day writing dialogue felt like taking dictation. They spoke and I listened in.
The biggest surprise was the minor characters who all had distinct voices of their own andwho piped up in my imagination, eager to be heard. When I first sat down in front of my computer, I might not have known much about Dennis the cheery rhythm guitarist or my protagonist’s snooty sister Jenna, but once I started writing their dialogue, I could hear their voices. Not literally, of course. But their speech rhythms, their choices of what to say or not say, revealed their characters to me, and, sure enough, they took on lives of their own, independent from what I’d intended for them.
Now that I’ve finished writing my first novel, I sometimes miss my characters. Every now and then I’ll browse through my manuscript just to revisit one of them. It’s a little bit like catching up with an old friend—even if that friend does happen to be imaginary.
--- April Lindner
Enjoy the trailer for JANE!
