Alyssa

The small scene between Kelly and Alyssa, conducted over the telephone, turned out not to be as difficult as I thought it would be. Some scenes loom heavy in my memory, perhaps due to a difficult gestation period when I first set them down, but more often than not, the rewrites are pretty smooth going. This particular scene, I thought, was going to suck. There's a bit of static between Kelly and Alyssa, and I guess I just didn't look forward to dealing that issue ... or whatever. Sometimes I come into it thinking I have to reinvent the wheel (of sorts) during a rewrite, too. That hardly ever turns out to be the case. It's a lot easier when you know how to eat an elephant: one bite at a time. I go line by line, piece by piece, and the little details stitch together into a nice little blanket that gets me through. This scene was like that. Mostly I just had to tune up some dialogue that read flat.

This scene in particular bears an eerie similarity to an actual conversation Jen and I had way back in the early going of our relationship, which might have exacerbated my reluctance to tackle the scene. Kelly and Alyssa work it out more easily than we did, though. That wasn't a fun night.

Alyssa remains my favorite character to write for, amid some heavy competition. The things she does, and the things she says, and the way she does and says them -- they all add a lot of gasoline to the engine of the story. Her dialogue is especially fun because she doesn't talk like anyone else in the book. This is also true of Emma, who is very precise in her speaking, but Alyssa's speech has a style all it's own, which makes it so much fun to write. I could write for her all day long.

A lot of the fun of that character is also that everything she says is a little suspect. So, as a reader, you kind of have to listen to what she says, think about what she isn't saying, and try to figure out what she's up to most of the time. Another way to put that, and this is my rule of thumb for writing the character: everything that Alyssa says *could* be a lie. Some of it most certainly is, a lot of it isn't, but all of it *could* be. How much of which falls into which category?

You'll see.