Writing a Character Who Speaks Volumes Without a Voice

Being a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s was, for me, a steady diet of nostalgia. Classic rock radio, television sitcoms set in the 1970s. I can’t even tell you how many times I paid to see The Wedding Singer in the movie theater, because it was that many times. And, of course, there was the pinnacle of nostalgia programming: Behind the Music, which, more often than not, included the short segments of memory from women who were collateral damage on the way to someone else’s stardom.

(How Do I Develop a Character's Voice?)

I didn’t think about what it meant to do all this looking back, so often framed through the experiences of famous men, while the present-day pop culture was focused on developing “it” girls for the purpose of devouring them whole. As an adult, though, I can see that this particular period has shaped what I write—and how.

I gravitated toward the Sunset Strip, long known as a beacon for both rock stars and groupies alike, with all those clubs and bars nestled together in just a few blocks under the glow of neon lights. The 1970s saw the rise of the “baby groupies”—girls in their early teens appearing on the arms of men who were on their way to becoming rock legends. Girls who were still children, whose experiences were brushed off with “it was a different time,” or “she wanted it,” no nuance invited.

My debut novel, The Cover Girl, begins in this era, telling the story of Birdie Rhodes, who becomes a model at 13 and meets a rock star when she poses for his album cover at age 15. He seduces her and convinces her parents to let him assume legal guardianship so he can take her on tour.

Most important to me was centering Birdie’s experiences, not only during her time with the rock star, but long after, showing how the relationship shapes the rest of her life. Perhaps paradoxically, the main way I approached this was through her lack of spoken dialogue.

This silence came naturally; the novel began as a short story, and even then, Birdie only spoke in italics, and not until the final section. I was several chapters deep into my first novel draft before I really thought about why it felt so natural and decided to embrace her withholding as a conscious craft choice.

Fully developing Birdie’s silence meant challenging myself as a writer and thinking about craft more deeply than ever. The smallest word choices and grammatical constructions made the difference, allowing her summaries and internal reactions to flow with traditional dialogue and ensuring these conversations followed their own natural rhythm so that the reader could be lulled into this world rather than pulled out every time someone spoke.

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This created its own tension with showing versus telling—a risk of telling too much. I made a tradeoff. By having Birdie tell in one way, I could show something else. This included:

Birdie’s silence exists before she meets the rock star, showing how she is shaped by her environment. She is the only child of older parents and a young model; as such, it’s drilled into her early and constantly that she should be seen and not heard (a message that hadn’t changed much by the time I was a teen 25 years later). She comes to know where her value is.

And while she states in the narration she knows no one is interested in what she has to say, withholding her own voice is another way to show how deeply she has internalized this. Her silence also demonstrates the imbalance of the relationship the rock star pushes her into, illustrating it in a way that doesn’t sexualize her more than the world has already. Everything goes through him: He knows everything, he has all the answers, and she’s subject to it all.

Throughout The Cover Girl, the reader has access to the traditional dialogue other characters speak to Birdie, but in response, she summarizes, telling the reader what she said and making them reliant on the accuracy of her recollection, or she reacts in what appears to be an aside, leaving the question of what was actually said open to interpretation.

At the same time, Birdie struggles with memory, forcing herself to forget certain things or people for her own psychological safety as she avoids the truth of what happened to her. Her silence conveys to the reader how limited her version of events is. She could say anything, but the fact that she doesn’t think what she might say is worth sharing says everything.

Birdie’s time with the rock star shapes the rest of her life; her coming-of-age takes decades because of how her growth is stunted. When it falls apart, the rock star has something to go back to. Birdie’s formative years are spent in his charge, and her frame of references for the world are mostly limited to her modeling career and the time spent with him.

Her lack of dialogue then becomes a way to show what was robbed of her. Her youth, her identity-defining experiences, her ability to know herself—she missed out on all of this, and for most of her adult life, the only way she can move forward is through repression. She can’t talk about the reality of her life, literally or metaphorically.

The truth is, stories like Birdie’s are often treated as inconvenient footnotes or as fodder for taking down powerful men. Her existence is defined by the importance of someone else, making me look back at all that nostalgia programming that brought her into my life and wonder: What exactly was I supposed to be nostalgic for, anyway?

So much of The Cover Girl is about trying to find the words: to say what happened, to call a predator what he is, to fill in the hazy outline of a memory. It’s about finding your voice to speak the truth, and extending that metaphor into dialogue not only challenged me as a writer, but it brought me closer to Birdie. In a world that tries to silence girls like her, she found a way to roar back—on her own terms.

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