Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to interview Moira Young, author of the Dust Lands series, by phone along with a couple of other bloggers. Chatting with her and getting some very specific insights into the world of the Dust Lands, the characters and particularly the language of the books was, in a word, awesome. I adore this series and cannot wait to see what happens in Book 3.
Below is the transcript from my conversation with Moira. Check out Mundie Moms, Page Turners Blog and Supernatural Snark to see their interviews.
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| Moira Young |
And it's basically a hero's journey. A western set in the future, I think, I would describe it as, amongst other things.
WPP: Ever since I started reading the series, I've been particularly interested in sort of the dialect and speech patterns and how that's reflected on the page. How did you get to that point? How did you sort of transcribe your characters?
Moira Young: Well, let me think now. What's the best way to talk about this?
You will have heard me talking about that early draft, which was in the third person. I didn't realize what I needed to find was her voice. And that’s why I was dissatisfied with that early version. It didn't feel authentic to me, it didn't feel like I was saying what I wanted to say, even though I wasn't quite sure what that was. I was searching for a way to tell this story about a girl whose brother had been kidnapped at some time in the future. That was the basis for it.
And I really had to, through my very long first draft, the one that took me so long to write, I started off, you know, in the third person. And by the time that draft ended up, I was inching towards Saba's voice. I had gone through periods of having her be eight years old, and she just gabbled. She would gabble in long, long, long sentences without any commas. I was trying to get into her head, I was trying to hear her.
