Cherise Wolas's new novel is The Family Tabor.From her Q&A with Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl:
GG: To what extent does grammar play a role in character development and voice?Visit Cherise Wolas's website.
CW: The deep-diving I do into the marrows of the people in my novels—I never call them characters because they are completely real and alive to me—organically creates their unique voices, their specific cadences of thought and speech, which includes how they grammatically express themselves. The particular voices come naturally, but then I work very, very, very hard to get each voice absolutely right; every interiority and every line of dialogue must belong to that particular person, and could not be thought or spoken by any other person in the book.
I feel incredibly fortunate that the ways in which my fictional people think and express themselves, affects readers so much they feel my people jumping off the page and into their own lives. With The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, I’ve received many requests from readers asking where they can purchase the story collections and novels written by Joan Ashby and excerpted in the book. This lets me know that I made Joan Ashby fully real and completely alive. This overwhelming response is joyous to a writer. And the same incredible response seems to be happening with The Family Tabor, for...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.
The Page 69 Test: The Family Tabor.
Writers Read: Cherise Wolas.
--Marshal Zeringue