Are All Authors Eavesdroppers?

She can't draw. She can't sing or dance. But she's always been able to sit in a corner and listen. And she has loved to read since she was 3 years old. "When you read all the time, language comes naturally to you," Susan Straight said by phone from her Riverside, Calif., home. Her most recent novel, "A Million Nightingales," traces the amazing life of a young slave girl growing up in Louisiana in the early 1800s.

Straight, who lives with her three daughters, teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She does most of her writing by hand in little notebooks while sitting in the car waiting for one of her daughters. Then she does the rest in the evenings after her daughters are in bed. "Being a good listener is essential," Straight tells her students. In fact, she believes most writers are natural eavesdroppers. They work hard to learn "the natural rhythms of people's speech. You have to get the dialogue right."

As a lover of language, Straight also speaks French, Spanish and Swiss-German. She found it difficult, though, during her research trips, to be fluent in "Louisiana French," which has its own dialect. "Nightingales" is Straight's first historical novel, although she has written four previous books.