DeepDive Sneak Preview #6: Hannah Pittard

DeepDive: Oftentimes, writers who are perhaps in early drafts or early stages of their career might miss opportunities to create more powerful fiction by failing to deliver emotional scenes in dialogue. You don't want to miss that opportunity, right? You want to actually have your characters speaking when things get intense.

Hannah Pittard: I completely agree. An editor once said something about a book of mine, and it took me longer than it should have to understand what she meant. She told me that the book didn't have enough oxygen in it. And about five years later, walking down a side street, I was like, Things need oxygen to live. The book was flat. It wasn't alive. And dialogue, in moments of intensity, can provide oxygen in a scene. It brings in air. It literally takes the movement of air to make words and to speak. Good dialogue can completely revolutionize a page that is otherwise just a wall of paragraphs. It creates space on the page and it delivers oxygen to the reader in moments of intensity or complexity. So many times for me, a turning point in a book or a story happens when something gets said accidentally or something is revealed aloud.

DeepDive: And you're great at it, I should say. I’m talking with you about this because you're particularly good at writing really punchy, funny, psychologically astute dialogue.

Hannah Pittard: I love eavesdropping on people. It started when I was young. I come from a family that is complicated, very close and pretty dogmatic in their beliefs. And passionate. And I was also the youngest, and I didn’t like when my brother and sister would get into it at the dinner table. You know, usually on polar opposite sides of things, especially when we were younger. And I didn't like being involved in these arguments, but I loved listening. And so it started with really paying attention to how conversations moved, almost reptilian at times, the way a little piece of language can be deliberately manipulated. And it's really interesting to watch a conversation—not listen to it, but watch it move around a room to see whether or not the person who is having their words spit back at them takes a moment and says, “No, no, that's not what I said.” Or if they let the morphing of the language or the morphing of what they've said stand.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald