“Ideas come to me through my ear. I will hear a character’s voice before I can see her face or know anything about her circumstances. As long as the voice is talking, I am writing. But inevitably that voice starts to wane, and with it my ability to put words on the page.
To combat this, I make sure to have a companion book that I am reading with a voice that is similar in some way to my protagonist. When I was working on Dear Lucy, I read The Sound and the Fury three times. Anytime my characters weren’t speaking to me, I turned to Faulkner’s characters that sounded close enough to my own to activate the auditory memory of their voices. The way being dropped in a foreign country whose language you studied in school will bring back years of vocabulary you were certain you had forgotten for good, reading a book with a similar voice, no matter how similar the content, will get my characters talking to me again.”
—Julie Sarkissian, author of Dear Lucy (Simon & Schuster, 2013)