Valerie Fraser Luesse | Dodging the Dreaded Coin

Spoiler alert: I’m about to seriously date myself. When I was in college, all my girlfriends were crazy about the movie Somewhere in Time, starring Jane Seymour and the late Christopher Reeve. In case that film was before your time, it’s about a modern-day playwright named Richard Collins, who travels back in time to meet, court, and win the heart of Elise McKenna, a turn-of-the-century actress whose image and mysterious story have captivated him. Just as it appears that love will win the day, Richard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a forgotten 1979 penny, which immediately yanks him out of the past, away from his soul mate, and literally “back to the future.”

My own stories are set in my native South, and I feel as if I
spend a big chunk of my writing time dodging The Dreaded Coin, working as hard as I can to
skirt my way around anything and everything that might yank a reader out of the story. It
doesn’t take much. One factual inaccuracy (like putting the Brazos River in Mississippi) or one
line of dialogue that sounds nothing like authentic Southern speech (“I’m mad about you! Mad
I say!”), and the curtain comes down. The reader is suddenly aware of ME—not my characters,
but me, the writer. They can see me pulling the strings, and that spoils all the fun of being
immersed in a story.

My new book, Almost Home, is set in Alabama during World War II. The editors at Revell and I worked hard to make sure we were factually accurate for that period. Sometimes we checked little things, like paper plates—were they available back then? Other times, we were looking at bigger issues, like PTSD—what did ordinary people call it and how well did they understand it in the 1940s?

Weather and the changing seasons are important to
Southern stories like mine because they affect everything from what the characters wear to
what they eat. Blackberries aren’t in season in March, so I ended up changing a spring dessert
from a blackberry cobbler to a strawberry pie. Again, dodging The Dreaded Coin.

Probably nothing hinders believability more than bad
dialogue. I live in fear of it. And I’ve about worn out the delete key on my computer, feverishly
tapping as I shake my head and scold myself: “Real people don’t talk like that!”

I know it’s time-honored advice to say, “If you want to write, you need to read.” But I would add to that: If you want to write dialog, you need to listen, everywhere you go—the waiting room at your doctor’s office, the grocery store, Walmart, church—everywhere. Listen to what the people around you say and how they say it. For example, rural Southerners don’t say, “A storm is approaching.” We say, “It’s comin’ up a cloud.” Big difference. One of my favorite scenes in Almost Home is the initial meeting between Reed and Daisy. The delete key got an especially brutal tapping as I worked on that scene, but in the end, it became exactly what I wanted because I feel like it’s very true to these characters—how they would approach and respond to each other, given their war experience. I love the instant chemistry between them, but it was important to have them both restrain it, in the beginning, because I think that’s what two people who have lost as much as they have would naturally do. They would proceed with caution. Probably the best advice I can offer is something I tell young writers at Southern Living magazine, which has been my home away from home for many years: Read your work out loud, especially when you’re struggling. Why? Because The Dreaded Coin is sometimes hard to see—but you can almost always hear it drop.