Quote of the Day (Pat Barker, on a Story’s Voice, ‘The Breath on the Mirror’)

“I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it ‘the breath on the mirror.’ If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly.” —Booker Prize-winning English novelist Pat Barker, “The WD Interview: Pat Barker,” Writer’s Digest, January/February 2025

If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road), you really owe it to yourself to see what wonders she can bring to historical fiction.

I have not yet read a later trilogy of hers, The Women of Troy, but I have to think that it must be very good, too. And a key part of her success has to be how she brings her characters to life in dialogue, as she describes above.

(The image accompanying this post, of Pat Barker at the Durham Book Festival in 2012, was taken October 27, 2012, by summonedbyfells.)