Real People

For Jess Taylor, creating characters begins with what comes out of their mouths:

When I first was writing and reading furiously, I decided that I had no interest in representing people who didn’t speak like real people. I wanted to represent people as I saw them, as they really existed, as they existed in my mind. Part of this is an attention to slang and other colloquialisms and part of this is really getting into the skin of a character, letting their perceptions affect the language. It might not be how everyone speaks, but it should be how that character would speak...I want to be true to these characters, I want them to be real and for the readers to understand the characters on multiple levels. For me, creating this illusion or effect starts at the level of language.